January 14, 2026
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
M51: The Whirlpool Galaxy
Birthday · January 14, 2026
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APOD published January 14, 2026. Credit: Michael Sleeman. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky. The featured deep image is a digital combination of images taken in different colors over 58 hours with a telescope from Lijiang, China. Anyone with a good pair of binoculars, however, can see this Whirlpool toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). M51 is a spiral galaxy of type Sc and is the dominant member of a whole group of galaxies. Astronomers speculate that M51's spiral structure is primarily due to its gravitational interaction with the smaller galaxy just above it.
Image credit: Michael Sleeman