IC 3956

IC 3956 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 485 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 72,000 ly, about 72% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 485 million years ago.

Because its light is 485 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3956 as it looked roughly 485 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).