Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Andromeda (And)  ·  Contains:  Andromeda Galaxy  ·  HD3765  ·  HD3969  ·  HD4143  ·  HD4174  ·  HD4322  ·  HD4501  ·  M 110  ·  M 31  ·  M 32  ·  NGC 205  ·  NGC 206  ·  NGC 221  ·  NGC 224
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M31 Andromeda Galaxy HaLRGB, Massimo Marchini
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M31 Andromeda Galaxy HaLRGB

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M31 Andromeda Galaxy HaLRGB, Massimo Marchini
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M31 Andromeda Galaxy HaLRGB

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Description

The Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31 or NGC 224), located in the Constellation of Andromeda is the largest Galaxy in the Local Group which also includes the Milky Way and Triangle Galaxy (M 33 or NGC 598), as well as about 50 other minor galaxies, many of them satellites of the main ones.
M31 is about 779,000 + 180 parsecs (2.54 + 0.6 million light-years) from the earth.
The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy, very similar to the Milky Way. On its arms, as on the other hand in our galaxy, there are visible reddish and dark regions containing ionized gases that gradually "focus" to give birth to new stars. M31 is estimated to contain 1000 billion stars and have a diameter of 220,000 light-years. Around M31 orbits M32 (or NGC 221), a dwarf elliptical galaxy about 2.9 million light-years from Earth, whose outer stars have been visibly torn apart by the gravitational pull of the bulky neighbor.
With a magnitude of +3.4 and an apparent size of 190'x60' M31 is the farthest object visible to the naked eye from Earth, with sufficiently dark skies.
M32 has a magnitude of +8 and an apparent size of 7'x5.8'.

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