(1) A galaxy is a large assembly of stars, gas and dust, held together by gravity.

The largest galaxies have 1 trillion stars or more. The smallest have only about 10 million stars.
Our own galaxy, sometimes called the ``Milky Way Galaxy'', contains about 200 billion stars.
This is approximately half the number of Oreo cookies that have ever been baked. Think of it -
two Oreos for every star in our galaxy. (To keep the lawyers off my back, I point out that ``Oreo''
is a registered trademark of Nabisco, Inc.)

What do galaxies look like? Here's a brief picture show. Click on the small images to get a larger
view.

This is the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31. It is the closest large neighbor to
the Milky Way Galaxy, being about 700 kpc away. (1 kpc = 1 kiloparsec = 1000 parsecs = 3260
light years)

This is the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51. Note the distinctive spiral structure
which it displays. In the larger image, you can see a neighboring galaxy just above M51.

This is the galaxy M87. Unlike M31 and M51, it is an ellipsoidal blob rather than a
flattened disk.

There are more than 100 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes. However, only four of them
are visible to the naked eye:

 Our own galaxy (visible as the Milky Way, stretching in a great circle across the sky).
 The Andromeda Galaxy (visible as a faint oval of light in the constellation Andromeda).
 The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (visible as irregular patches of light in the
Southern Celestial Hemisphere).

The distance between neighboring stars in a galaxy is about 10 million times the diameter of a
star. By contrast, the distance between neighboring galaxies is typically less than 100 times the
diameter of a galaxy.