M31, Jeff Donaldson

M31

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Located just to the north of the constellation bearing its name, the Andromeda galaxy appears as a long, hazy patch in the sky. It should appear as a smudge in the sky, even with moderate light pollution. If you live in a more populated place, you may have more trouble. Binoculars will clearly reveal its shape.

The visible fuzzy patch of stars stretches about as long as the width of the full moon, and half as wide; only with significant magnification can you tell it stretches six times that length in fullness.

A spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, Andromeda contains a concentrated bulge of matter in the middle, surrounded by a disk of gas, dust, and stars 260,000 light-years long, more than 2.5 times as long as the Milky Way. Though Andromeda contains approximately a trillion stars to the quarter to half a billion in the Milky Way, our galaxy is actually more massive, because it is thought to contain more dark matter

Comments

Histogram

M31, Jeff Donaldson