IC 3346

IC 3346 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 61 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 11,000 ly, about 11% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 61 million years ago.

Because its light is 61 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3346 as it looked roughly 61 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).