M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy
In the constellation of Ursa Major. In this part of the sky, east of the bright star Mizar and its companion Alcor, we can admire a beautiful galaxy which, with its galactic plane almost perfectly perpendicular to our line of sight, shows a very evident spiral structure. This is M101, or NGC 5457, discovered by Charles Messier and Pierre Méchain in 1874. M101 lies about 24 million light-years from Earth and has a diameter of about 170,000 light-years, nearly twice that of our own Milky Way.
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