IC 5002

IC 5002 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Telescopium about 215 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 84,000 ly, about 84% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 4,612 km/s.

Because its light is 215 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 5002 as it looked roughly 215 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).