Vollbrecht Planetarium

The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda is seen nearly edge-on, 13 degrees to our line of sight.

Known as NGC 224 and M31, it contains 300 billion solar masses.

That makes its larger in size but smaller in mass that our galaxy the Milky Way (MW). M31 and the MW are closing at 300 kps (185 miles-per-second) and may either collide in the far distant future or orbit each other.  M-31 is 2.3 million light-years (LY) away and 180,000 LY wide.  The MW is 100,000 LY wide.  Two of M-31's dwarf, satellite galaxies can be seen -- M-32/NGC 221 above and M-110/NGC 205 below.