IC 705

IC 705 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major about 137 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 31,000 ly, about 31% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 137 million years ago.

Because its light is 137 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 705 as it looked roughly 137 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).