IC 494

IC 494 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Canis Minor about 213 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 82,000 ly, about 82% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 213 million years ago.

Because its light is 213 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 494 as it looked roughly 213 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).