IC 3457

IC 3457 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 60 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 17,000 ly, about 17% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 60 million years ago.

Because its light is 60 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3457 as it looked roughly 60 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).