IC 3437

IC 3437 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 80 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 14,000 ly, about 14% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,779 km/s.

Because its light is 80 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3437 as it looked roughly 80 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). Recession velocity from RC3 (de Vaucouleurs et al. 1991, via NASA/HEASARC, public domain). Distance computed by gravityfinder from redshift via Hubble's law (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc).