I let my breath out slowly.

It is quite a sight.

It's the Andromeda Galaxy --- the closest large galaxy to our own. There are much smaller ones in the Local Cluster that are nearer to us, but even Andromeda is only about 3 million light-years away. Not even a long walk on the scale of the universe.

The French astronomer Robert Jonckhere studied it carefully during 1952-53, and estimated its disk diameter at over 200,000 light years. Not a bad piece of work for someone using only 2-inch binoculars, wouldn't you say? Thus Andromeda is about double the length of our own Milky Way galaxy.

But Andromeda has been known about for longer than a mere 50 years. Charles Messier, working in the late 1700s, already knew about it. He found its two brightest companions, M32 and M110, which are visible using only binoculars, and appear quite clearly in my little telescope. He started the Messier Catalog, which is where the 'M' in designations like M32 comes from. Andromeda's Messier designation is M31.

Its mass is estimated at 300 to 400 billion times that of Sol, our sun. This is considerably less than our current best guess for the mass of the Milky Way, so our galaxy seems to be much denser than Andromeda.

The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that the Andromeda galaxy has a double nucleus, probably because it has "eaten" a smaller galaxy which once intruded upon its core. Life in the Local Cluster may not always have been as quiet as it is right now.

To quote from SEDS: "Up to now, only one supernova has been recorded in the Andromeda galaxy, the Supernova 1885, also designated S Andromedae. This was the first supernova discovered beyond our Milky Way galaxy, on August 20, 1885, by Ernst Hartwig (1851-1923) at Dorpat Observatory in Estonia. It reached mag 6 between August 17 and 20, and it was independently found by several observers. However, only Hartwig realized its significance. It faded to mag 16 in February 1890."

SEDS, by the way, is a group that definitely shows how much power determined students can have if they work in unison. I think I have some information about them back in my study.