                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                                 2024 May 2

                     M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy
                    Image 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.

                    Tomorrow's picture: cloudy exoplanet
     __________________________________________________________________

       Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
            NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply.
                   NASA Web Privacy, Accessibility Notices
                      A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,
                           NASA Science Activation
                             & Michigan Tech. U.

