M101, A Spiral Galaxy Beyond The Milky Way

NASA and the European Space Agency released one of the the largest and most detailed photos ever seen of a spiral galaxy beyond the Milky Way on 27 February 2006. The image shows the glorious face-on spiral M101, located 25 million light-years from Earth in Ursa Major off the handle of the Big Dipper. The image is a mosaic of 51 Hubble Space Telescope frames and several ground-based shots. The Hubble images used to make this 16,000-by-12,000-pixel composite were assembled from archival data, which were taken for a variety of research projects dating from 1994 to 2003. The galaxy itself is roughly twice the size of our Milky Way and contains about 1 trillion stars.