IC 4187

IC 4187 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 531 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 85,000 ly, about 85% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 531 million years ago.

Because its light is 531 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4187 as it looked roughly 531 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).