Discovered 1781 by Charles Messier.

M90 is one of the larger (9.5x4.5') spirals in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. It has tightly wounded, smooth bright spiral arms, which appear to be completely "fossil", meaning that currently no star formation appears to take place, with the only exception of the inner disk region, near the darker dust lanes. This galaxy may be on the way to evolve into a state similar to M64, and then into a lenticular (S0) system.

As it is approaching us at 383 km/sec, it must have the very high peculiar velocity of nearly 1500 km/sec through the Virgo cluster into the direction pointing to us, and possibly is just in process of escaping the cluster; some sources have speculated it may already have left the cluster and be now a considerable distance nearer to us. Only one Messier galaxy is faster in approaching us, M86.

In 8" telescope, this galaxy looks rather large and elliptical with small compact bright core. There is also a bright stripe in direction of longer axis.