IC 46

IC 46 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Andromeda about 247 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 58,000 ly, about 58% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 247 million years ago.

Because its light is 247 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 46 as it looked roughly 247 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).