Galaxies

If you look at the starry sky at a dark location on a moonless night, you can see the milky band of our home galaxy - the Milky Way. All stars that can be seen with the naked eye belong to our galaxy. Altogether it consists of approx. 200 billion stars. In addition, there are several hundred billion solar masses of interstellar matter (see also Nebulae) as well as the mysterious dark matter.
From the northern hemisphere, our neighboring galaxy in the constellation Andromeda is also easily visible with the naked eye. The same holds for the Magellanic Clouds on the southern hemisphere. Beside these galaxies there is still innumerable amount of further galaxies in the universe. Due to of their great distance, only the fewest, or nearest of them, can be resolved into individual stars. In most cases you can only see the combined glow of millions of stars, star clusters (mostly colored bluish by young, hot stars) and nebulae (large emission nebula areas in red).
The galaxies show an impressive variety of shapes, ranging from elliptical galaxies to spiral and barred spirals to irregular galaxies.