IC 687

IC 687 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 470 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 470 million years ago.

Because its light is 470 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 687 as it looked roughly 470 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).