IC 3499

IC 3499 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 54 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 25,000 ly, about 25% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,226 km/s.

Because its light is 54 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3499 as it looked roughly 54 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).