Hubble Telescope serves up another stunner

Galaxies come in many flavors: weird blotches, giant footballs, vast fuzzy spheres. But the most photogenic, the ones that make you gasp, are always the magnificent spirals.

Our own Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, a hundred billion stars arrayed in a vast pinwheel 100,000 light years across. But there are bigger, more majestic galaxies than ours. The prosaically named M101 is such a monster: it's nearly twice the width of the Milky Way, and may have as many as a trillion stars. At 25 million light years from Earth, M101 looks like a faint smudge through binoculars, and a typical telescope will show you a nice view of its spiral arms. But when you aim a big telescope at it, the view gets significantly better...

This image is the latest from the Hubble Space Telescope: a panoramic view of M101 with higher resolution than has ever been seen before. It's also one of the largest images of a spiral galaxy ever taken (unless you happen to have a 200 megapixel camera lying around). On the Hubble website you can find more gorgeous images of it, and on its European counterpart you can even grab a monster 455 megabyte image file (not for the faint of heart, or the dialup connection).

Images like these from Hubble are more than just pretty pictures. They're serious science. Galaxies can be seen in the background, their light reddened by light years of dust in M101, in the same way the Sun turns crimson when it sets on a summer's evening. Clusters of newly born stars can be seen and studied, the masses of each individual star determined. Many of these stars will end their lives in titanic supernova explosions, and scientists will be able to go back and see which one blew its top. And there's so much more!

Of course, it is also a mighty pretty picture just to gawk at. That's okay too.