Back in the 18th century, Charles Messier was hunting comets. He was frustrated by objects that resembled the comets he was hunting, but were obviously something else. He then catalogued these objects so that they would not be confused with comets. M81 is the 81st object in his list, and was originally discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774. M81 is a beautiful spiral galaxy that is about 12 million light years distant from Earth. It is located in the constellation Ursa Major. Today, the Hubble Space Telescope released the best image of this galaxy ever taken. The image is so sharp, that you can even see the individual stars in the galaxy.

The sharpest image ever taken of the large “grand design” spiral galaxy M81 is being released today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.
A spiral-shaped system of stars, dust, and gas clouds, the galaxy’s arms wind all the way down into the nucleus. Though the galaxy is located 11.6 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope’s view is so sharp that it can resolve individual stars, along with open star clusters, globular star clusters, and even glowing regions of fluorescent gas. The Hubble data was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 through 2006. This colour composite was assembled from images taken in blue, visible, and infrared light.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA). Acknowledgment: A. Zezas and J. Huchra (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

The massive image has a resolution of 22,620 x 15,200. That is over 343 million pixels. Just for the sake of comparison, the Texas Advanced Computing Center has a tiled display that is 307 million pixels. You can download the Tiff file, which comes in at approximately 690 MB, or the large Jpeg file at a mere 345 MB. I downloaded the Jpeg file, which took about 15 minutes.

via: Hubble photographs grand design spiral galaxy M81

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