What is the oldest thing you can see? At 2.5 million light-years away, the answer is the rogue eye of the Andromeda galaxy, because its photons are 2.5 million years old when they reach you. Most of the other apparent inhabitants of the night sky stars, clusters, and nebulae appear as they did only a few hundred to a few thousand years ago because they lie well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Because of its distance, the light from Andromeda is also probably the most distant object you can see. The Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, dominates the center of the magnified image shown, taken last month from the Sahara desert in Morocco.
The selected image is a combination of three background exposures and one foreground exposure – all taken with the same camera and from the same location and on the same calendar day – with the foreground image taken during the evening blue hour. M110, the satellite galaxy of Andromeda is visible just above and to the left of the nucleus of M31. As great as it can be to see this galaxy neighboring our Milky Way with one’s own eyes, long camera exposures can capture a lot of faint and breathtaking detail. Recent data suggests that our Milky Way Galaxy will collide and merge with the similarly sized Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years.
For more read: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220711.html
Image Credit: NASA Pics
