Hubba Hubba Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image ever taken of a spiral galaxy, in this case Messier 101, which is better known as the Pinwheel Galaxy.

Astronomers stitched together 51 separate images from Hubble to build the mosaic image (above.).

The Pinwheel Galaxy is about 25 million light-years from Earth and 170,000 light-years wide, almost twice the diameter of our own Milky Way, and is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars. Astronomers believe that perhaps 100 billion of those stars may be similar to our sun, and millions of individual objects can be picked from this image.

To put things in perspective, the light that reached Earth to construct the image left the Pinwheel Galaxy during our planet's Miocene Period, when the first mastodon appeared and mammals were flourishing.

To read more and view the mosaic in greater detail than above, go the NASA's Hubble website.

Warning: There are a number of image options, some of which offer fantastic detail, but they're very slow to download or could crash your computer if it doesn't have sufficient horsepower.