April 8, 2023
The night sky on your birthday is never quite the same twice — the planets shift, the constellations drift, the Moon wears a different phase.
M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy
Birthday · April 8, 2023
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APOD published April 8, 2023. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100 (alias NGC 4321) is 56 million light-years distant toward the constellation of Berenice's Hair (Coma Berenices). This Hubble Space Telescope image of M100 was taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 and accentuates bright blue star clusters and intricate winding dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies. Studies of variable stars in M100 have played an important role in determining the size and age of the Universe.