IC 408

IC 408 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Lepus about 482 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 270,000 ly, about 2.7 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 482 million years ago.

Because its light is 482 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 408 as it looked roughly 482 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).