• Question: Have you seen the andromeda

    Asked by Ozzlord to Ollie on 3 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Alexander Burke

      Alexander Burke answered on 3 Mar 2018:

      Unfortunately not, I’ve never seen the Andromeda Galaxy. I can tell you some cool facts though.
      First of all, the Andromeda Galaxy is roughly 3 million lightyears away. That is, it takes light 3 million years to travel from the Andromeda Galaxy to our planet, Earth. Also, it’s pretty cool that, the Andromeda Galaxy will eventually smash into our one in around 5 billion years.

Comments

  • Photo: Ozzlord

    Ozzlord commented on :

    Awesome!!!! I’ll just wait till I’m 5 billion years old!

  • Photo: Guy

    Guy commented on :

    I’ve seen it in a small telescope. The light from the Andromeda galaxy is quite spread out (unlike a star, where the light is from one point on the sky) and that makes it harder to see. Only the centre bits are bright enough to see easily, so it looks smaller than it does in a long-exposure photograph.

    You can just about see it without a telescope if you go somewhere really dark; but then it would only look like a faint fuzzy smudge. Of all the things in the sky that you can see without a telescope it’s one of the most distant.