Open in 3DWhat it is
A grand spiral whose pull is stirring up its neighbour, the Cigar Galaxy.
The picture hangs at that distance facing Earth, as large as it is on the sky; how deep the object is cannot be seen, so it is flat.
The picture
- Taken by
- NOIRLab
- Picture spans
- about 80,000 ly
- From the Sun
- 11.8 million light-years
- RA / Dec
- 148.75° / 68.92°
Messier 81
Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a D25 isophotal diameter of 29.44 kiloparsecs (96,000 light-years).
From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA · Read the article
Far beyond
- Whirlpool GalaxySpiral galaxy, M51 · 28 million light-years3D

Picture: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/George Hatfield and Flynn Haase
- Sombrero GalaxySpiral galaxy, M104 · 31.1 million light-years3D

- Centaurus AElliptical galaxy with a dust lane, NGC 5128 · 12.4 million light-years3D

- Webb's First Deep FieldGalaxy cluster SMACS 0723 · 5.1 billion light-years3D

- M87*, imagedEvent Horizon Telescope, 2019 · 53.5 million light-years3D

- Stephan's QuintetGroup of galaxies · 290 million light-years3D

- Pinwheel GalaxySpiral galaxy, M101 · 21 million light-years3D

- Messier 87Giant elliptical galaxy · 53.5 million light-years3D

Picture: Digitized Sky Survey 2 (STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, UKSTU/AAO), via CDS hips2fits