Sometimes your own galaxy can get in the way. Every individual star the unaided eye can see belongs to the Milky Way, but our home galaxy is also filled with big clouds of dust that block our view in certain directions. One of those dusty directions is toward the constellation Cassiopeia, which looks like a bright letter W or M in the northern sky on autumn nights. This region contains what may be the nearest giant elliptical galaxy to Earth — which no one knew about a mere 50 years ago. Italian astronomer Paolo Maffei spotted this object in 1967, so today it’s known as Maffei 1. Other astronomers identified it as a galaxy. In part because of all the intervening dust, though, no one knows exactly how close it is. It’s probably about 11 million light-years away — only four times farther than the Andromeda galaxy, which is the nearest giant galaxy to our own. Giant galaxies come in two main types: spirals and ellipticals. Andromeda and the Milky Way are spirals — they look like beautiful
