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The Andromeda Galaxy You’ll Never Visit
Roaring Rivers
Torrents, currents, and ripples by Christyl Rivers, PhD.
It’s good to see a galactic neighbor
Our nearest neighbor Galaxy, M31, Andromeda, can be seen with the naked eye if you have a view far from light pollution.
Look for the ‘W’ shape of Cassiopeia and look two hands lengths below the second W dip. Or, find the great square of Pegasus and look for a faint blur off to the left.
I first saw it when I was a teen — when my vision was better and skies were darker. Today, I need binoculars to make it out but it’s always worth it. The light you see there comes from the sparkle of roughly one trillion stars, many more than our own Milky Way is thought to have.
The blur from that light has been traveling for more than two and a half million years to make it into your eyes and mind. Which is astonishing. It was first recorded almost one thousand years ago by a Persian astronomer, Al Sufi. Because human beings used to know seasons and navigate by stars it is certain that many billions of people have seen Andromeda but had no sense of just what they were seeing.
Edwin Hubble deserves the credit for realizing that Andromeda was more than a distant cloud, or nova. He effectively…