IC 3313

IC 3313 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 50 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 19,000 ly, about 19% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 50 million years ago.

Because its light is 50 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3313 as it looked roughly 50 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).