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I'm far from an expert star watcher, but I can identify quite a few northern constellations. When my vision was still 20/20, I used to look for the Andromeda Galaxy when I was out viewing on a very dark night (and, of course, when it was above the horizon). It looks something like this:
With the naked eye on a very dark night it looks like a very dim, fuzzy star.
But when I was looking up some information about Andromeda I stumbled on
an article that showed what Andromeda would look like if it were brighter:
It would show up in the night sky as an object wider than several full moons put side to side. I had no idea.
Sorry for the science-astronomy geek out for those of you who could care less.
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Brighter AND our atmosphere was clear. Look at it through a nice telescope on a clear winter's night. YOWZA !
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Cool!
I always enjoyed being able to see our own Milky Way galaxy at night when I would go camping in upstate NY.
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Imagine how it will look when our galaxy collides with Andromeda!
;-)
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DP wrote:
And one day it will take up most of the sky and then we'll collide with it. But it'll be a few years before it does. A few billion to be exact...
Here's a pic from a couple of years ago showing M31 in the upper center of the image. A goal of mine is getting a better image of it this year.
http://forums.macresource.com/file.php?1...th+sky.jpg
Wow. That's a very nice picture.
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cbelt3 wrote:
Brighter AND our atmosphere was clear. Look at it through a nice telescope on a clear winter's night. YOWZA !
I saw it through a friend's ten inch reflector once. It was sooo much better than even with binoculars.
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mikebw wrote:
Cool!
I always enjoyed being able to see our own Milky Way galaxy at night when I would go camping in upstate NY.
When I was much younger I would look at the constellation Sagittarius where the center of the Milky Way is located (from our point of view) and wonder what was at the core of our "little" island of stars. At best, black holes were thought of as hypothetical possibilities back then, and I'd certainly never heard of them then, so I never imagined anything like the super-massive black hole that a lot of evidence indicates is at the center.
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freeradical wrote:
Imagine how it will look when our galaxy collides with Andromeda!
;-)
That would be really cool to see. Here's a recent animation of what it would look like from a "god's eye" point of view:
https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018...021318.php
