The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51 or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus.

It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. 
It is 31 million light-years away and 76,900 million light-years in diameter.

M51 refers to the pair of galaxies which are M51a and M51b.
It is 88% the size of the Milky way and believed to be only 400 million years old.

The Milky Way is well over 8 Billion years old, potentially 13.6
This is one of my more recent pieces of work and contains

50, 300 second  images, 4.23 hours of data.
It was taken Bortle 4 Sky.

The equipment used was:
Celestron Edge HD 9.25
ASI ZWO240MC Pro OSC
Optilong L Extreem Filter
ZWO AM5
ASIAir Plus
Williams Optics 50mm Guide Scope
ZWO ASI174  Mini Guide Camera.

The image was processed using Pixinsight and Photoshop.