IC 3097

IC 3097 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 58 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 13,000 ly, about 13% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 58 million years ago.

Because its light is 58 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3097 as it looked roughly 58 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).