IC 845

IC 845 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Virgo about 500 million ly from Earth. It spans roughly 120,000 ly, about the width of our Milky Way. The light reaching us tonight left it about 500 million years ago.

Because its light is 500 million ly from home, you are seeing IC 845 as it looked roughly 500 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).