Bodes Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy

09h 55m 43s   +69° 22′ 21″

These two galaxies sit about 12 million light-years away in Ursa Major, close enough to be gravitationally entangled with each other. M81, Bode's Galaxy, is a textbook grand-design spiral — elegant, symmetrical, with sweeping arms of young blue stars tracing its rotation. Its companion M82, the Cigar Galaxy, is the opposite: a starburst galaxy ripped into overdrive by a close encounter with M81 roughly 300 million years ago. That gravitational interaction compressed M82's gas so violently that it's forming new stars at ten times the rate of a normal galaxy, and super-heated plumes of gas are being blown thousands of light-years above and below its disk. Seen together in the same field, they're a study in contrast — one calm and ordered, the other in beautiful, productive turmoil.