How to find Andromeda
Home of the Andromeda Galaxy — the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye.
Alpheratz — shared with the Great Square of Pegasus.
Andromeda is a chain of stars stretching off the corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, best placed on autumn evenings. Its claim to fame is the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), a vast spiral two and a half million light-years away.
Under a dark sky M31 is visible to the naked eye as a faint, elongated smudge — the farthest object most people will ever see without a telescope.
Finding the galaxy
Star-hop from the Great Square: follow the chain of Andromeda's stars, then step 'up' two stars to land on M31. In binoculars it's an obvious oval glow; a telescope begins to reveal its companion galaxies.
M31 is the nearest large galaxy to our own and is slowly heading toward a collision with the Milky Way billions of years from now.
How to find it
- Find the Great Square of Pegasus on autumn evenings
- From its top-left corner (Alpheratz), follow the chain of Andromeda's stars
- Step up from the second bright star to the faint oval glow of M31
Deep-sky highlights
- Andromeda Galaxy (M31) — naked-eye under dark skies, with satellites M32 and M110
- The Blue Snowball Nebula (NGC 7662) for telescopes
Stella shows exactly when Andromeda is highest from your location tonight — and whether the sky is worth it.
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