IC 3987

IC 3987 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 486 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 69,000 ly, about 69% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 486 million years ago.

Because its light is 486 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 3987 as it looked roughly 486 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).