IC 2601

IC 2601 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 476 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 48,000 ly, about 48% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 476 million years ago.

Because its light is 476 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2601 as it looked roughly 476 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). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).