During the 10th Century, the Persian astronomer Al Sufi first noted, and later drew attention to a curious, elongated patch of light that was located amidst the stars that we know today as Andromeda. For lack of a better description, Al Sufi referred to this dim, yet distinct light patch as a "Little Cloud."

Even today, binoculars and telescopes reveal that "cloud" as little more than an elongated fuzzy patch, which gradually brightens in the center to a star-like nucleus.

Please forgive this patch of light for being so faint and tired looking. You will when you realize that, as you see it tonight, this light has been traveling some 2,900,000 years to reach you, traveling all that time at the tremendous velocity of 671 million miles per hour (1 billion kilometers per hour).

The light you are seeing was emitted around the time of the dawn of human consciousness.

When the light set off on its 17-quintillion-mile journey earthward, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers roamed much of North America and prehistoric man struggled for existence in what is now the Olduvai Gorge of East Africa.

When you have finally located this "little cloud," know that it is actually made up of over 300 billion suns like the one we see every day. It is the great Andromeda Galaxy. The galaxy is so distant that only a telescope and camera combined can show its true nature.

Long-exposure photographs reveal it to be huge collection of stars very much like our own galaxy.

We call the galaxy we live in the Milky Way -- or the Latin, Via Lactea -- for the system’s appearance in the sky. The Greeks used the words gala and kyklos, meaning milk and circle, which explains the English word galaxy.

When astronomers began to realize that there were other such vast congeries of stars, they called them "island universes," but this was an obvious misnomer; since universe means everything there is, it can hardly have a plural. So we’ve settled on galaxies, which is a compromise as a new meaning for an old word.