There is just something wonderful when Hubble points to nearby spiral galaxies. Sprawling and detailed, we get both great resolution on smaller features as well as a jaw-dropping overview of a grand spiral... like, say, NGC 1073:
Yeah, I know. [Click to galactinate -- I had to shrink it to fit here, and it lost a lot of the coolness when I did -- or grab the 3900 x 3000 pixel version.] NGC 1073 is a decent-sized spiral galaxy about 60 million light years away. It's actually part of a small, tight group of galaxies many of which are far more famous (like NGC 1068). But 1073 is important because of a simple property: it looks like us.
While it's not a perfect match, NGC 1073 does bear an interesting resemblance to our Milky Way galaxy (UGC 12158 looks more like our galaxy, but is far bigger, for example). Both ...
