IC 745

IC 745 is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 53 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 12,000 ly, about 12% of our Milky Way's width. It is receding from us at about 1,087 km/s.

Because its light is 53 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 745 as it looked roughly 53 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).