IC 456

IC 456 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Canis Major about 81 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 55,000 ly, about 55% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 81 million years ago.

Because its light is 81 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 456 as it looked roughly 81 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).