IC 2597

IC 2597 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 141 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 110,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. It is receding from us at about 3,007 km/s.

Because its light is 141 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2597 as it looked roughly 141 million years ago. The photons left before that much of history had passed, and are only now reaching us. This distance is estimated from the galaxy's redshift, so the lookback time is approximate.

Source: structural data (position, morphology, brightness, redshift) from OpenNGC (CC BY-SA). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).