IC 2861

IC 2861 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 295 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 71,000 ly, about 71% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 295 million years ago.

Because its light is 295 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2861 as it looked roughly 295 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).