Oops! Sorry again! I guess not enough caffeine yet today. Of course it’s 26 THOUSAND light years away.
26 light years would be the distance of the relatively nearby star Vega, ‘star’ of the film Contact with Jodie Foster.
I think that was why the figure was stuck in my head. I used to mention Vega in my sidewalk astronomy sessions here in New York City a few years back, Vega being one of the brighter stars in the sky, and easily visible even here in light-polluted NYC. It’s part of the Summer Triangle with Deneb and Altair.
“Arroway discovers a signal repeating a sequence of prime numbers, apparently sent from the star system Vega some 26 light-years away. This announcement causes Drumlin and the National Security Council led by Michael Kitz to attempt to take control of the facility.
Arroway’s team then discover a video buried in the signal: Adolf Hitler’s opening address at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Arroway and her team postulate that this would have been the first television signal strong enough to leave Earth’s atmosphere, taking 26 years to reach Vega and then transmitted back from there.”—wikipedia