IC 3494

IC 3494 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices about 340 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 30,000 ly, about 30% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 340 million years ago.

Because its light is 340 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3494 as it looked roughly 340 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).