IC 747

IC 747 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 265 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 50,000 ly, about 50% of our Milky Way's width. The light reaching us tonight left it about 265 million years ago.

Because its light is 265 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 747 as it looked roughly 265 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).