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How would you like to see the furthest thing visible to the naked eye? It’s possible, but you’ll have to bundle up and lean back on a lawn chair. Your neighbors may think you’ve loved sitting there in the winter, but you’re on a mission! You’re out in the cold trying to find the Andromeda Galaxy, our own Milky Way galaxy’s neighbor, home to our sun and possibly another 300 billion stars, and God knows how many other planets! It is possible to see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye, but you need a dark country sky to do so. If you’re trying to spot Andromeda in areas affected by light pollution, you’ll want to have binoculars or a small telescope. Be sure to leave your new telescope and any eyepieces you will be using outside for 30 to 45 minutes to allow the glass and mirrors to acclimatize to lower temperatures. Otherwise you can get some very blurry and funky images.


Once you’ve settled into your lawn chair, try to give your eyes a good 15 to 20 minutes to adjust to the darkness and regain your night vision. If you use a star chart or the diagram in this column, use a flashlight with a headband and a red lens to avoid ruining your night vision. You can buy these at a hardware store or anywhere that sells camping supplies. You can use a smartphone app like Sky Guide to find it. It works great. Make sure you put the screen in red night vision mode.


Diagram for locating the Andromeda Galaxy
(Mike Lynch)

The best way to find the Andromeda Galaxy is to locate the constellation Andromeda the Princess, associated with the constellation Pegasus the Winged Horse in the early evening high southeastern sky. In the constellation, Andromeda follows the moderately bright star Mirach about halfway along Andromeda’s bright arc of stars. To the upper right of Mirach you see two much fainter stars. Look for a small, faint, patchy cloud to the upper right of these stars. That’s it, the Andromeda Galaxy. You’ll probably need binoculars or a small telescope to find it.


You certainly won’t be amazed when you see it for the first time. All you see is a ghostly spot of light and a clear core. Even with my large telescopes that I take to my stargazing parties you usually don’t see much more than that, although through larger telescopes in a dark sky the galaxy will have a little more shape and definition. Astronomical photographs reveal more details because they can collect and accumulate more light than our human eyes.


Nevertheless, that tiny ghostly speck of light is made up of the collective light of possibly a trillion stars 2.5 million light-years away. Just one light year is equivalent to almost 6 trillion miles. Because a light year is defined as the distance light travels in a year, Andromeda’s light has been traveling to your eyes for 2.5 million years. We do not see the light as it is now, but as it looked 2.5 million years ago. From what astronomers know about the lifespan of galaxies, their appearance hasn’t changed much, even over a few million years.


Despite that incredible distance, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are our closest neighbors. Yet Andromeda is undoubtedly a larger galaxy, possibly twice the size of our Milky Way. Like our own galaxy, most of the mass that makes up Andromeda is invisible, what astronomers call dark matter, which remains a great mystery.


The Andromeda Galaxy is very important to the history of astronomical discoveries. Less than a hundred years ago, the Milky Way Galaxy was all we thought there was in the universe. What we now know as the Andromeda Galaxy was then considered just a big cloud of nebulosity. That all changed in the 1920s when Edwin Hubble and his assistant Henrietta Leavitt discovered that the Andromeda galaxy was much further away than previously thought. They used so-called Cepheid variable stars to measure how far away Andromeda was. Cepheid variable stars vary in size and brightness over a period related to the average brightness. They are what astronomers call ‘standard candles’. It turned out that through careful observation and photographic analysis, variable Cepheid stars were found in the Andromeda Galaxy. By observing their brightening and dimming cycles, it was determined that the Andromeda galaxies were much further away than anyone had ever imagined. Moreover, it was concluded that it was a completely different galaxy, independent of our Milky Way. Edwin Hubble gets all the credit for this discovery, but Henrietta Leavitt discovered the Cepheid variables in Andromeda and did most of the labor-intensive legwork.


The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy are on a collision course. They are approaching at an estimated speed of 60 to 80 miles per second! I wouldn’t worry about it that much because even at that speed the two galaxies won’t crash anytime soon. Give it a little over 4 billion years.


Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and Adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.


Starwatch programs


Saturday, January 12, 5:30-8:30 PM at the Springbrook Nature Center in Fridley. This is a dinner and program. For more information, call 763-572-3588 or visit www.springbrooknaturecenter.org/361/Springbrook-Nature-Center.



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