IC 4494

IC 4494 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 690 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 190,000 ly, about 1.9 times the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 690 million years ago.

Because its light is 690 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4494 as it looked roughly 690 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).