The Andromeda Clique

Andromeda (M31), M32 and M110, DSLR on telescope tracking mount.

Andromeda galaxy and its two smaller cousins captured using an SLR camera and a zoom lens from my backyard.

The swarm of stars that look like the background is actually the foreground, all of them within our Milky Way. While we can’t make out any individual stars in Andromeda here, two astronomers with inputs from a third, studied it and happened to change our understanding of the universe and our place in it forever.

Remnants

Crab Nebula; Nov 22, 2022

The year was 1054. Emperor Renzong of the Song Dynasty reigned in China out of the capital city Kaifeng on the southern banks of the Yellow River. On the 4th of July, at the break of dawn, a bright star burst into view in the sky in the constellation of Taurus. It was so bright, it could be seen during daytime. It remained visible for 23 days during the day.  The star faded slowly over time and on 6 April 1056, 642 days or nearly two years later it disappeared from view. The Chinese wrote about it, as did the Japanese and Arabic astronomers.

Today, a thousand years later, a tenuous wispy cloud is all that remains in place of the progenitor star, now known as the Crab Nebula or Supernova Remnant 1054.