IC 3510

IC 3510 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 64 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 15,000 ly, about 15% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 64 million years ago.

Because its light is 64 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3510 as it looked roughly 64 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).