IC 4691

IC 4691 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Ophiuchus about 290 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 290 million years ago.

Because its light is 290 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4691 as it looked roughly 290 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).