Astronomers have catalog numbers for everything: M104, NGC 4676, UGC 10214. But nobody falls in love with a catalog number. The galaxies people remember are the ones that got nicknames, and most of those nicknames come from something you could find in a kitchen drawer, a backyard pond or a hat shop. Here are the galaxies named after everyday things, what they actually look like, why they got their names, and one fact about each that’s worth bringing up at dinner.
A quick note on distances: they’re estimates, and different surveys disagree, sometimes by 10 to 20 percent. The figures below mostly follow NASA and ESA/Hubble.
Sombrero Galaxy (M104): the hat
What it looks like: A bright, swollen central bulge cut across by a sharp, dark lane of dust. We see it almost edge-on, so the dusty disk reads as a hat brim and the glowing bulge as the crown.
Why the name: NASA puts it plainly: it looks “like a broad-brimmed Mexican hat.”
Where: About 28 million light-years away in Virgo, near the border with Corvus.
Fun fact: The Sombrero has roughly 2,000 globular clusters, dense balls of old stars. That’s about 10 times as many as our Milky Way has. Hubble picks out many of them as tiny dots scattered around the bulge.
Whirlpool Galaxy (M51): the drain
What it looks like: Two long, perfectly curled spiral arms seen face-on, with a smaller yellowish galaxy, NGC 5195, sitting at the tip of one arm like a ball about to go down the drain.
Why the name: Those swirling arms look like water spinning in a whirlpool.
Where: About 31 million light-years away in Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), just below the handle of the Big Dipper.
Fun fact: M51 was the first galaxy anyone recognized as a spiral. In 1845 Lord Rosse looked through his giant 72-inch telescope in Ireland, the “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” and sketched the spiral pattern decades before anyone knew galaxies were separate from the Milky Way.
Cigar Galaxy (M82): the smoke
What it looks like: A long, thin, mottled streak of light, with red plumes of glowing hydrogen billowing out above and below its middle.
Why the name: Seen nearly edge-on, it’s long, narrow and stubby at the ends, like a cigar. And the plumes look a bit like smoke.
Where: About 12 million light-years away in Ursa Major, close in the sky to its larger neighbor M81 (Bode’s Galaxy).
Fun fact: M82 is the textbook starburst galaxy. It makes stars so fast that it is about five times as bright as the Milky Way, and its center is about 100 times brighter. A close pass by M81 probably set off the burst. Those red plumes are a “superwind” pushed out by all the young stars and supernovae.
Pinwheel Galaxy (M101): the toy
What it looks like: A big, face-on spiral with loose, slightly lopsided arms dotted with pink star-forming regions.
Why the name: It looks like a paper pinwheel caught mid-spin.
Where: About 21 million light-years away in Ursa Major.
Fun fact: Pierre Méchain discovered it in 1781, and it was one of the last objects Charles Messier added to his catalog. In May 2023 it gave amateur and professional astronomers a treat: supernova SN 2023ixf, one of the closest supernovae seen in years.
Cartwheel Galaxy: the wagon wheel
What it looks like: A wide blue ring of young stars around a smaller inner ring and core, joined by faint “spokes.”
Why the name: Rim, spokes and hub: it’s an old wooden wagon wheel.
Where: About 500 million light-years away in Sculptor, in the southern sky.
Fun fact: The Cartwheel is a ring galaxy, and ring galaxies come from collisions. A smaller galaxy plunged almost straight through the middle of a larger one. That sent a wave of compressed gas rolling outward, like a ripple from a stone dropped in a pond, and new stars lit up along it. The ring is huge, about 188,000 light-years across by one measure, so wider than the Milky Way.
Black Eye Galaxy (M64): the shiner
What it looks like: A smooth, bright spiral with a dark band of dust sweeping across one side of its core.
Why the name: The dark dust next to the bright center looks like a black eye. It’s also called the “Evil Eye” and, more kindly, “Sleeping Beauty.”
Where: About 17 million light-years away in Coma Berenices.
Fun fact: The gas in M64’s outer region orbits in the opposite direction from the gas and stars further in. Astronomers think that’s left over from a smaller galaxy it swallowed long ago. You can see the dark “eye” in a modest backyard telescope.
Sunflower Galaxy (M63): the flower
What it looks like: A golden core surrounded by many short, patchy arm segments rather than two long, clean arms. Astronomers call this a “flocculent” spiral.
Why the name: NASA notes that the arms “recall the pattern at the centre of a sunflower”: a bright disk ringed by tightly packed petals and seeds.
Where: About 27 million light-years away in Canes Venatici. It belongs to the M51 Group, so it’s a neighbor of the Whirlpool.
Fun fact: Méchain found it and Messier logged it on June 14, 1779. In the mid-1800s Lord Rosse made it one of the first galaxies where anyone saw spiral structure.
Tadpole Galaxy (UGC 10214): the pond creature
What it looks like: A blue, disrupted spiral “head” trailing one enormously long, thin tail of stars.
Why the name: Round head, wiggly tail: a tadpole.
Where: About 420 million light-years away in Draco.
Fun fact: The tail is more than 280,000 light-years long. A smaller galaxy that passed close by pulled it out with gravity. Hubble’s 2002 image of the Tadpole also shows thousands of more distant background galaxies, so it doubled as one of the deepest views of the universe at the time.
The Mice (NGC 4676): the rodents
What it looks like: Two spiral galaxies side by side, each dragging a long, straight streamer of stars and gas behind it.
Why the name: The long tails. Two bodies, two tails: a pair of mice.
Where: About 300 million light-years away in Coma Berenices, per ESA/Hubble. Some newer estimates put it closer to 340 million.
Fun fact: The tails are tidal. Each galaxy pulls harder on the near side of the other than on the far side, so stars get stretched out into streams. The two galaxies will probably keep colliding until they merge into one, something astronomers expect the Milky Way and Andromeda to go through billions of years from now.
Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038/4039): the bug
What it looks like: Two tangled galactic cores glowing with pink and blue star-forming knots, with two long, curved arcs of stars sweeping out from them.
Why the name: In wide-field photos those two long arcs look like an insect’s antennae.
Where: In Corvus. Estimates range from about 45 million to about 65 million light-years.
Fun fact: William Herschel discovered the pair in 1785. Today they’re going through a starburst: clouds of gas and dust are slamming together, and the crash is producing new star clusters at a furious rate.
Hockey Stick Galaxy (NGC 4656/4657): the sports gear
What it looks like: A long edge-on galaxy that bends sharply at one end.
Why the name: Straight shaft, bent blade. It’s also called the Crowbar or the Fish Hook, depending on what’s in your garage.
Where: About 30 million light-years away in Canes Venatici.
Fun fact: The bend is probably damage from a run-in with its neighbors, especially NGC 4631, the Whale Galaxy. So the hockey stick got bent by a whale.
Needle Galaxy (NGC 4565): the sewing kit
What it looks like: A razor-thin spiral seen perfectly edge-on, with a small bulge in the middle split by a dark dust lane.
Why the name: Long and narrow: a sewing needle.
Where: Roughly 30 to 50 million light-years away in Coma Berenices, close to the north galactic pole.
Fun fact: Herschel found it on April 6, 1785. It’s the classic example of an edge-on spiral, and it’s a good stand-in for how our own Milky Way would look to someone viewing it from the side.
The Cosmic Owl: the bird
What it looks like: Two nearly identical rings side by side, each with a bright center, and a bluish blob of new stars where they meet.
Why the name: The two rings and their bright cores are the owl’s eyes, and the starburst between them is the beak.
Where: Much farther than anything else on this list. It lies at a redshift of 1.14, so its light left it roughly 8 billion years ago. It sits in the COSMOS survey field in Sextans.
Fun fact: Researchers reported it in 2025 using JWST, ALMA and the VLA. It’s two collisional ring galaxies crashing head-on, and each one has an active black hole. A radio jet from one of them reaches the collision zone and helps set off the starburst in the “beak.” A single ring galaxy is already rare, so finding twin rings colliding is rarer still.
Seeing them yourself
Several of these galaxies are bright enough for backyard telescopes. M51, M64, M82, M101, M104 and M63 are all Messier objects, and on a dark night a 5-inch telescope shows the Whirlpool’s companion, the Cigar’s long shape and the Sombrero’s dust lane. The Tadpole, the Mice, the Cartwheel and the Cosmic Owl need big observatories or space telescopes. For those, the Hubble and Webb image archives are the best seats in the house.
Further reading
Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ Smartphone-Guided Telescope
A 130mm reflector with a phone dock that points you to targets. It has enough aperture to pick up the Whirlpool’s companion and the Sombrero’s dust lane from a dark site.
Turn Left at Orion (5th Edition)
The classic backyard observing guide. It shows what galaxies like M51, M64 and M104 actually look like in a small telescope, and how to find them.
Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas, Jumbo Edition
Spiral-bound, easy-to-read star charts covering the whole sky. A good way to star-hop to the Messier galaxies in Ursa Major, Canes Venatici and Virgo.