#2: THE ANDROMEDA
GALAXY
During the 10th
Century, the Persian astronomer Al Sufi drew attention to an object amidst the
stars, which we now call Andromeda, the Princess to 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.
The Andromeda galaxy is
still about halfway up in the west-northwest sky, where you can seek out Al
Sufi’s little cloud -- a small hazy spot if the night is perfectly clear and
moonless. It is, in fact, the most distant object that the human eye can see
without any optical aid.
Please forgive this patch
of light for being so faint and tired looking. You will when you realize that,
as you see it now, this light has been traveling at least 2,200,000 years to
reach you, traveling all that time at the tremendous velocity of 671 million
miles per hour. The light you are seeing is around 22,000 centuries old and
began its journey around the time of the dawn of human consciousness.
When Andromeda's light began
its nearly 13-quintillion-mile journey earthward, mastodons and saber-toothed
tigers roamed much of pre-ice-age 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," it is hard to believe that it is actually made
up of over 300 billion suns like the one we see every day. It is so distant
that only the telescope and camera combined can show its true nature. Long-exposure
photographs reveal it to be a whole universe of stars like our own galaxy.
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