IC 3218

IC 3218 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 49 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 9,100 ly, about 9% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 49 million years ago.

Because its light is 49 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3218 as it looked roughly 49 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).