This is a beautifully detailed image of the Sunflower Galaxy, aka Messier 63 and NGC 5055.
It's a spiral on the same scale (approximately one hundred million light years across) as the Milky Way, and its structure is so clearly seen that it was one of the first so-called "spiral nebulae" to recognized as such. The smaller image is an infrared view showing just how intricately the spiral structure of this object is revealed. Click the main image for the APOD page. Click through for the higher resolution view.
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