Hubble delivers again: M101

One thing that amazes me about astronomy is that even after, what, 30 years of doing it (I was really young when I started) I still get surprised at some basic facts. That picture above is the spiral galaxy M101, a staple of amateur observing. It's a big, bright, face-on spiral, and since it's in Ursa Major (near the Big Dipper) it's up most of the year. I've seen it a few times myself, though usually when I'm looking in books. Actually, in a lot of those books, it's claimed that our own Galaxy would look like M101 if you could get outside of it. But boy, is that ever wrong! M101 is a lot bigger than the Milky Way. A lot. It's 170,000 light years across, compared to 100,000 for us. We have an impressive 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, but M101 is bursting with something like ...