Messier 106 is an elongated spiral galaxy, seen by us at a low angle, in the constellation of Canes Venatici (CANE-eez ven-AT-ih-sigh, the hunting dogs). It's about 25 million light years away, give or take. That may sound far -- 250 million trillion kilometers! -- but for Hubble, that's considered close. So if you take a stack of Hubble images of M106 and put them together, as amateur astronomer Andre vd Hoeven did, you get a lovely picture it!
[Click to galactinate and get access to a zoomable version -- and you want to. I shrank the image considerably to get it to fit here. (UPDATE: there's a HUGE version at Flickr.)] M106 looks a bit odd to my eye. The overall structure is pretty typical for a two-armed spiral seen at this low angle, but still... those red spots mark the location of busy star formation. The hot young ...
