Tag Archives: Andromeda

In the Sky This Week – July 18, 2017

The Catholic Astronomer avatarPosted on by
This entry is part 15 of 44 in the series In the Sky This Week

Venus continues to dominate the morning sky in the east, but appears slightly lower in the sky each morning as it pulls ahead of us in its orbit. The waning crescent Moon will appear near Venus the the star Aldebaran on the mornings of July 19th and 20th. The New Moon will be on the 23rd. Jupiter and Saturn appear in the south-southwestern sky after sunset; Jupiter will appear slightly lower in the western sky each day as the Earth pulls ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. The constellations Pegasus and Andromeda appear low in the northeast sky after sunset; the wispy cloud of M31, the Andromeda galaxy, makes a good target for telescope observers. M31 is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It is 2.5 million light years distant, and heading straight at us; in a little over 4 billion years, it will collide with the Milky way, and the two galaxies will merge into a large … Continue reading →

High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy

The Catholic Astronomer avatarPosted on by

The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And, there are lots of stars in this sweeping view — over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk. This ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe’s population of over 100 billion galaxies. Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area. Most of the stars in the universe live inside … Continue reading →