Andromeda Galaxy by Anon via SEDS. Click for larger.

We all know the Andromeda Galaxy but how many have actually seen it from your back yard?  You can you know, if you have good dark adapted eyes and fairly dark skies you need nothing else.

If you are like me you need a little help and binoculars are all you really need.  It’s not going to look quite like the picture above.  I’ve got no decent images of M 31 either I am always fighting a Maple tree for it and the tree always wins.  Pity.  Ah well, it won’t be long and I’ll be packing the observatory up and moving away from here – darker skies and no obstructions but that’s a whole other story.

Oh M31?  Yeah that’s still the Andromeda Galaxy, it’s just the designation given to it my Charles Messier in his famous catalogue in 1764.  Andromeda was known to man long before that, there is mention of it in the volume Book of Fixed Stars by the Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman Al-Sufi as it was indeed a naked-eye object with the dark skies back then.

Andromeda is notable for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is blue shifted.  Mostly we hear about red shifted objects, those objects that are moving away from us.  Andromeda is moving toward is at roughly 300 km/sec, that’s a little over 671,000 miles per hour, but don’t worry, even at that prodigious rate it’s going to be a very long time before it gets here.

Ok, enough babbling, how do you find it?  As usual, be out of bright lights for a time.

If you have a scope, point it to: RA: 00h 43m 22s   Dec: +41°19’58″(current), someday I will endeavor to explain that too.

If you do not then use the following as a guide:
9pm local time:  Azim: 84°16’28″   Alt: +65°19’24″
12 midnight:  Azim: 257°03’02″   Alt: +81°05’36″

For the azimuth a compass will help you greatly, for the altitude you can easily estimate that by holding your fist out in front of you (get that arm straight).  It’s about 10 degrees wide, so start parallel to the ground and simply count up putting one fist atop the other.  Also note the position change, you will need to estimate that depending on your time.  The nice thing about binoculars is the field of view is generally large enough so it looks at a good portion of the sky.