Back to the Hood

Here are two images of the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large galaxy to us, right next door not even three million light years away. (The video in yesterday’s post zooms to a range of over 12 billion light years away.)

The first known representation of Andromeda is the little collection of dots to the right of the fish’s mouth in the drawing below, an illustration from the tenth-century Book of Fixed Stars by the Persian astronomer, Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi, who called it the Little Cloud.

The photo below of Andromeda (and its two much smaller companion galaxies) is from an anonymous source, probably taken in 1937. Andromeda was the first galaxy verified as a galaxy outside of our own Milky Way by Edwin Hubble, less than 90 years ago.