IC 4243

IC 4243 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 558 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 81,000 ly, about 81% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 12,105 km/s.

Because its light is 558 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4243 as it looked roughly 558 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).