IC 4497

IC 4497 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Boötes about 171 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 42,000 ly, about 42% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,707 km/s.

Because its light is 171 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4497 as it looked roughly 171 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).