IC 2971

IC 2971 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 393 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 80,000 ly, about 80% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 393 million years ago.

Because its light is 393 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 2971 as it looked roughly 393 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).