IC 4478

IC 4478 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 256 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 43,000 ly, about 43% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 256 million years ago.

Because its light is 256 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4478 as it looked roughly 256 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).