Aiming for Andromeda

When we peer into the dark night sky, the vast majority of objects that we can see without binoculars or telescopes are stars in the nearby neighborhood of our Milky Way Galaxy. Depending on the sharpness of our eyesight and if our eyes have had a chance to adjust to the darkness, we may be able to see some 4,000 stars—only a very few of which are planets and various nebula. Though our galaxy contains something on the order of 100-400 billion stars, we can see but the tiniest fraction of the closest ones, by naked eye. There are maybe 100-200 billion galaxies—which reside so far away that only the most powerful telescopes can see them. (Note that there is quite a range of estimates of the number of stars and galaxies; it is not easy to approximate these quantities.)

Yet there is one galaxy—just one—that we can see with the naked eye: Andromeda Galaxy; the closest one to ours. Andromeda appears quite large in the winter sky—about the size of 5-6 full moons laid side by side. That sounds pretty spectacular—and it is—but most of us will never get the chance to spot this galaxy. Why? For two reasons: (1) you'll never find this faint object if you are looking for it anywhere near the bright lights of a city, and (2) it is extremely faint; even on a dark country night you need to know exactly where to look, but still can easily miss it.

I have struggled for years to spot this sister galaxy of ours. I know exactly where to look and I wait until my eyes have adjusted to the dark... but no luck so far. It's frustrating, because I feel certain that I once saw Andromeda about three decades ago. It was spectacular! It was unlike any other sight in the night sky. I did not know precisely where to look at the time, so I put down my discovery that night to being blessed with great fortune. The vision has remained like a photograph in my mind, which I've conjured up from time to time.

So why have I failed to view Andromeda gain, after all these years? I do know just where to look, but no luck so far. I can come up with three possible explanations: (1) my aging eyes are not as sharp as they were a few decades ago, (2) even though we live in a very rural area, light pollution has relentlessly increased since then, or (3) just maybe I was imagining I once saw Andromeda.

Then, the other night, as I sat in the outdoor tub, intently looking at the place where the galaxy should be, I thought I saw a faint smudge... very faint. It wasn't at all spectacular—just a wan, fuzzy blob; nothing like what I observed decades ago. Is this all that my weakening eyes can now see, or was I maybe once again just imagining I could see it?

Searching for Andromeda

When you walk outdoors on any clear night and gaze upwards, you may see 2-3 thousand stars, if you're away from interfering city lights. Every single star you spot resides in our Milky Way Galaxy. There are a few hundred billion stars out there in our home galaxy, though you'll see, naked eye, at most a couple of thousand. Get yourself a pretty decent telescope and you'll maybe see a few tens of thousands of Milky Way stars, but that's still just a very small fraction of the total.

There's another quite different kind of astronomical object than stars in our home galaxy to look for: Andromeda Galaxy. It's much farther away than any star within our galaxy, but it can still be observed, because it's so huge. Due to its distance, however, we can't distinguish with the naked eye any of Andromeda's individual stars. All we see is a milky smudge.

The other night my neighbor came by for a two-person star party. He brought the beer, I set up my telescope, and we set out to view the heavens. As our solar system planets are currently not visible overhead in this November's night sky, Andromeda was our best celestial object for the evening, so we set up to view it.

Andromeda is not an easy thing to locate... at least for me. That's why I bought a very nice telescope a couple of decades ago. It comes with a small but amazingly capable computer that both steers the telescope to celestial objects and then locks onto them, following them across the night sky, as the Earth rotates. It's a wonderful little tool; align the scope to the North Star and another prominent star, and you've calibrated it for the night. Now all you do is type in the name of one of several thousand celestial delights in the tiny device and the scope will slew itself around, to stop and aim itself at the object you chose.

Unfortunately, the problem for an old analog guy like me, when trying to operate one of these digital wonders, is that I can't always understand the instructions. The directions confuse me and my thumbs are just a little too slow and clumsy, and I screw it up. I know if I had a 12-year-old computer nerd with me, he'd have the whole thing nailed in five minutes.

Unable to perform the alignment procedure accurately enough to have the little computer locate any celestial choice of mine, I must do it manually. So when my neighbor arrived he and I partnered, in an analog attempt to find Andromeda. I had been successful a couple of nights earlier (after an hour or so of effort) so I knew it could be done.

Despite our diligent attempts, we failed. I thought at one point that we were zeroing in, but alas, we saw no Andromeda. No big smudge; just more stars. Maybe the beers were impeding our astronomical skills. Whatever the limitation, Andromeda was not to be found that night.

What we did discover, however, was a phenomenon that every night sky observer comes upon, if you spend more than 15 minutes looking up on a clear, dark night: there are so many other things to see. Over the next couple of hours we gazed at the Pleiades, the Hyades, and then we dove into the core of our Milky Way Galaxy, where you can see so many stars that they blend into, well, a milky trail across the sky. The only thing that terminated our evening was the November chill penetrating into our bones, and opening the last two beers.