IC 691

IC 691 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 56 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 19,000 ly, about 19% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,225 km/s.

Because its light is 56 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 691 as it looked roughly 56 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).