IC 542

IC 542 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Hydra about 418 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 150,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 418 million years ago.

Because its light is 418 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 542 as it looked roughly 418 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).