It is located in the constellation Cetus at a distance of 45 million light-years from Earth. M77 has an apparent magnitude of 9.6 and can be seen using a small telescope.

The observable universe contains as many as an estimated 2 trillion galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated 10²⁴ stars – more stars (and, potentially, Earth-like planets) than all the grains of beach sand on planet Earth.

Our home galaxy is called the Milky Way. It's a spiral galaxy with a disk of stars spanning more than 100,000 light-years. Earth is located along one of the galaxy's spiral arms, about halfway from the center. Our solar system takes about 240 million years to orbit the Milky Way just once.

The Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust and gas. It's called a spiral galaxy because if you could view it from the top or bottom, it would look like a spinning pinwheel.