The Sky This Month
Welcome to our night-time sky. Please
enjoy this month’s tidbits of knowledge.
We are lucky to live in a dark-sky area
where the heavens can shine through.
I hope you enjoy the sky and perhaps
learn a thing or two. Happy star gazing!
The Andromeda Way – is the name
that I prefer. The Andromeda Galaxy is
our nearest spiral galactic neighbor and
is on a collision course with our own
galaxy, the Milky Way. Astronomers believe that Andromeda
and the Milky Way will eventually collide to form a new gal-
axy. They have given various names to the future galaxy, but the
generally accepted name is Milkomeda – sounds like a dietary
supplement to me. In any case, Andromeda is speeding towards
us at 270,000 miles per hour! But do not worry too much; it will
still take about 4 billion years for Andromeda to traverse the 2.5
million light-years between the two galaxies. If you would like to
see our spiral neighbor, pull out your binoculars and try to locate
it. Start out facing northeast. Look for a large W turned on its
side with the bottom of the W pointed to the right. The W is part
of the constellation Cassiopeia. Now imagine that two triangles
make up the W, one on top of the other. The top triangle points
directly to the Andromeda Galaxy to the right. As you look to
the right, about the same distance as from the top to the bottom
of the W, look for three stars in a straight line pointing up and to
the left. The bottom star will be the brightest, the middle star is
more dim, and you can just barely make out the third star on a
moonless night. Andromeda lies just above the third star. You can
identify it as a small fuzzy white patch in the sky. Do not be too
disappointed when the view from your binoculars (or telescope)
does not look like the beautiful pictures that you see of spiral gal-
axies. Those pictures are taken from hours-long exposures from
telescopes that are many feet in diameter.
Dial M for Messier – Charles Messier was a French astrono-
mer who lived from 1730 to 1817. During his employ, he began
to catalog the deep sky objects that were visible to him through
h