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Credit & Copyright: Drew Evans
Explanation:
Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a
grand design
spiral galaxy.
The large galaxy of over 100 billion stars has
well-defined spiral arms, similar to our own
Milky Way.
One of the brightest members of the
Virgo Cluster of galaxies,
M100,
also known as NGC 4321 is 56 million
light-years
distant toward the well-groomed constellation
Coma Berenices.
In this telescopic image, the face-on grand design spiral shares
a nearly 1 degree wide field-of-view with slightly less conspicuous
edge-on spiral NGC 4312 (at upper right).
The 21 hour long equivalent exposure from a dark sky site near
Flagstaff, Arizona, planet Earth,
reveals M100's bright blue star clusters and intricate winding
dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies.
Measurements of variable stars in
M100
have played an important role in determining the
size and age of the Universe.
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A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: M 100 - spiral galaxy
Publications with words: M 100 - spiral galaxy
See also: