0875NOTPerseusAndromeda

0875NOTPerseusAndromeda_astronomy

wikipedia
NASA.gov
Ovid Met.4.663-5.249

M31 Andromedae [= Messier Object 31], The Great Andromeda Galaxy, photographed through high-power telescope

The galaxy is "the brightest and nearest of all the spirals, and the only one which can be considered a definite, obvious naked-eye object. As seen without optical aid it appears as a small elongated bit of fuzzy light, about 1-degree west of the star Nu Andromedae. A pair of good binoculars will be found very useful in searching for it." Burnham's Cel.H'book

Al Sufi knew the celestial object as "the Little Cloud" in Andromeda. 17th-century telescopy allowed closer study. Dr E. Hubble in 1924 definitively identified it as an extra-galactic object. It is an aggregation of billions of stars like our own Milky Way itself. Its distance from Earth is 2.2 million light years, or 13 thousand quadrillion miles.

The earliest identification of the constellation as Andromeda was probably near the end of the 5th century, perhaps under the influence of Sophocles and Euripides plays called "Andromeda". See Kidd on Aratus Phaen. 197-204.

See SkyMap.org for lots of images of the constellation and scientific details.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.