The Andromeda Galaxy

M31 - The Andromeda galaxy at 2.5 million light years away from us!

Satellite galaxies, M110 and M32, are clearly visible. While editing this image, I found a tiny smudge directly below M110. When I looked it up on Simbad, I saw that it was catalogued as UGC 394, a galaxy that 267 Million Light years away from us! When photons from these galaxies, captured by my camera, started their journey, Earth was in the Mesozoic era, the age of the reptiles! The third picture shows this galaxy.

M31 is the most distant thing we can see with the unaided eye. From our point of view the Moon is about 0.5 degrees across the sky. Andromeda is about 6 times bigger. This spectacular neighbor is approaching our Milky Way at about 110 kilometers per second (68 miles/s). This galactic collision is predicted to occur in about 4.5 Billion years.

The stars from the galaxies are sufficiently far apart that it's improbable that any of them will individually collide.