IC 4753

IC 4753 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Pavo about 178 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 45,000 ly, about 45% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 3,750 km/s.

Because its light is 178 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 4753 as it looked roughly 178 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).