It’s Right over My House! 
Thursday November 20, 2003 by Hal
And I guess it’s been there all the time! (What the heck is he talking about? I don’t know — he’s kind of strange; he must be introverted.).
I’ve been a backyard astronomy buff for a long time and a few years back I got a wonderful pair of binoculars with image stabilizers. I’ve looked at stars and planets and the moon.
Then I came across an article online telling how to find M31; the Andromeda galaxy. Andromeda is our neighbor and is heading straight for us at 65,000 meters per hour and will get here in several hundred million years then BANG (just kidding).
For many nights I hunted using the directions I’d found (2nd star to the right and straight ahead till morning — wait, wrong directions.) Then, after many false starts and cloudy nights, there it was — a faint smudge of light about the size of a capital “O”. Light that left Andromeda 200 million years ago lightly struck my retina.
I was awestruck — the human mind cannot grasp these sizes and distances; and the worst (best?) thing is that this smudge of light representing 100 Billion stars is still only a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the known universe.
Okay, I’m exhausted and done now. If you’d like to see a picture taken by the big ‘scopes you can go here — I’ll use my imagination.
