majestic Whirlpool galaxy

Oh my... the awesome majesty of the Whirlpool galaxy as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. And here is a bigger, clearer, more mind-blowing image:
http://www.universetoday.com/am/uploads/2005-1019whirlpool-full.jpg

I came across it in an article by Steven Soter called Where is Everybody? at Universe Today
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/wheres_all_the_life.html?19102005

It examines Fermi's Paradox, and and why it seems there are no intelligent signals out there when you'd think that with countless stars, even an extremely low probability of civilisations would yield many of them.