View Single Post
Old 03-21-2013, 09:49 AM   #1
pdurrant
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.pdurrant ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
pdurrant's Avatar
 
Posts: 71,504
Karma: 306214458
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Norfolk, England
Device: Kindle Voyage
How big is the Andromeda Galaxy?

A quick poll on an astronomy question!

Now, I'm not asking how big the Andromeda Galaxy (the nearest big galaxy to our own Milky Way) actually is, but how big it appears to be in our night sky.

Well, it's not very bright, but if it were lots brighter, so that we could see it easily, how big would it be in the sky, compared to the only object in the sky with a visible size that we can look at easily - the moon.

I've made a picture to help you, showing Andromeda and the moon, from 25x the width of the moon down to 1/5 the width of the moon. (You can imaging a tiny oval and a point size object, I'm sure!)

The answer is behind the spoiler. No peeking until you've voted in the poll!

Attached Thumbnails
Click image for larger version

Name:	Moon and Andromeda.jpg
Views:	226
Size:	94.4 KB
ID:	103268  

Last edited by pdurrant; 03-21-2013 at 10:45 AM.
pdurrant is offline   Reply With Quote