Night Sky II
Once spotted in the UK autumn night sky, never forgotten - after all squares don’t have a natural feel to them! Four stars - Markab, Scheat, Algenib and Alpheratz - make up the Great Square of Pegasus as useful as the belt of Orion for getting your bearings on the night sky. The give away is the black emptiness of the square. It’s actually not a constellation in itself but belongs partly to Andromeda and partly to Pegasus. Two stars on the square are on a straight line drawn from the Pole star to the edge of Cassiopeia constellation. Here’s the most distant spot the human eye can see unaided. Andromeda galaxy (M31) has some hundred billion suns and is 2.2 million light years away. How can you find it? By finding the dark square of Pegasus and skipping two stars from one of the corners straining your eye to find an elliptical blur. Binoculars show it more obviously but don’t bring out the beautiful spiral shape evident in this telescope picture. It’s called the Andromeda ...