Posted on 08/30/2015 2:26:51 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: What is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy? Andromeda. In fact, our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of billions of stars that compose it. The several distinct stars that surround Andromeda's image are actually stars in our Galaxy that are well in front of the background object. Andromeda is frequently referred to as M31 since it is the 31st object on Messier's list of diffuse sky objects. M31 is so distant it takes about two million years for light to reach us from there. Although visible without aid, the above image of M31 is a digital mosaic of 20 frames taken with a small telescope. Much about M31 remains unknown, including exactly how long it will before it collides with our home galaxy.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Credit and Copyright: Robert Gendler]
The Big One
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Wine With Your Nose? (M31/Andromeda) - Roxanne (3/8) Movie CLIP (1987) HD
Been there done that as well, Dyer Observatory, Vanderbilt University, ca. 1976. I did mostly photo-spectrometry but Andromeda was a plate.
:’) Plate-like, as well. ;’)
So ... Chicken Little is right after all!
Preppers, get ready!
We used to work in a small Ugandan village, a 300 mile drive from power lines. It was also a dry climate and we lived at an elevation of 5500 feet.
On Fall & Winter nights I’d sit outside the tent with the kids, asking them, “What is the farthest thing you can see?” Most days we could walk over the edge of the Escarpment, look down into Kenya’s Great Rift Valley and see 20 to 30 miles. I told them about one really clear day when I lifted off from Nairobi and could see both Mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro.
After we’d turned the lantern off and all eyes had fully adjusted to the dark, I’d show them how to find Andromeda, how to “look around it”, not “at it” until they all could find it.
“That, kids, is about 2 million light years away.
Light travels 186K miles per second times
60 seconds/minute times
60 minutes/hour times
24 hours/day times
365 days/year times
2 million.”
I know this is “old hat” to most of us, but take a kid outside one night, away from the city lights. Find Cassiopeia, come left, perpendicular, off the middle star to the second of the two equally spaced stars. Look a little right & down from it and you’ll see the hazy spot (”nebula”) that is Andromeda. Binoculars really make a difference, but you really can see it with the naked eye!
Two Million Light Years away!
More awesomeness! Thanks!
When younger I could see M33 (almost 3 million l.y.) when it was really dark.
People have reported seeing M81 at 12 million l.y., from REALLY dark sites.
Unfortunately with my 6 inch Orion Andromeda is still not much more than a bright smudge in the sky...but yes you can see it with the naked eye, the trick is to not try and look directly at it, same as several objects that are visible but not if you look right at them.
You can also see the Hercules cluster that way on a good night.
WOW! I wished I'd known that when I had younger eyes!
Nice!
Whoops. The clip isn’t long enough.
I don’t worry about light pollution, and in my lifetime, here in the Boonies, the amount of artificial light has increased. Luckily, there hasn’t been any big drive to slap up bunch of suburban ranh-manses to the south of us, the town is small, there hasn’t been a big drive to put up street lights, and it still gets pretty dark. The amateur astronomers have their observatory over near Lowell, and last time I was there (open house I suspect it was) it was still really dark. Some of their members did a little PR work during ArtPrize 2013 (I didn’t end up going in 2014), and set up their personal scopes (including one of those giant Dobsonian reflectors) on the lawn of the Museum. Despite the city lights, whatever we were looking at (Saturn, for one thing, if memory serves) was visible.
If the choice is between having no nighttime lights versus inconveniencing astronomers, I’ll take the former; ground astronomy is a nice hobby (and it’s largely a subset of a photography hobby), but really big discoveries will continue to shift to off-world unmanned observatories, and ground-based observations using radioastronomy (for near-Earth objects, particularly on the Sun-side). :’)
:’)
Which came first, Chicken Little or the cosmic egg?
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