The moon is at last quarter tonight giving a dark sky from sunset at 6:10 p.m. until the moon rises at 11:23 p.m. Look east at 8 and you will see beautiful Jupiter nearly 30 degrees above the horizon.
To the left (north) of Jupiter stretches the constellation of Andromeda the Maiden, the daughter of Cassiopeia the Queen of Ethiopia. Andromeda doesn't look anything like a princess, mainly consisting of three stars extending northeast from the square of Pegasus.
Pegasus the Winged Horse is a large square of relatively bright stars that looks nothing like a horse. Inside the square are dimmer stars, the number of which you can see depends on the sky's darkness on a given night.
Almach, the end star of Andromeda, is closest to the eastern horizon with the rest of Andromeda extending higher above the horizon until it joins Pegasus.
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Andromeda and Pegasus are sometimes tricky to find at first. However, they are large and bright, and become familiar friends after a while. Andromeda is especially interesting, because it contains the Great Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31 when the famous French astronomer Charles Messier (1730-1817) included it as the 31st entry in his catalog of important sky objects.
The Andromeda Galaxy is about 2.5 to 2.9 million light years away, and it is one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye. It can be seen with the unaided eye in a dark sky, and it is a wonderful sight in binoculars or a small telescope. M31 is a large spiral galaxy comparable to our parent galaxy, the Milky Way. In fact, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are the largest galaxies in the Local Group of Galaxies of about 40 members traveling together through space as a small galaxy cluster.
For more about the skies
Learn more about what's in the sky this fall when the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association meets Friday on the University of Arizona campus.
The free event starts at 6:30 p.m. with a lecture on astronomy fundamentals that spans the fall parade of constellations and planets, great deep-sky objects such as the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), and meteorite activity that includes the Orionids, Taurids, Leonids, Geminids and Ursids.
At 7:30 p.m., Dimitrios Psaltis, an associate professor of astronomy and physics at the UA, will speak on "Hunting for Extra Dimensions with Black Holes in the Universe and in the Large Hadron Collider." Check out the association's website, www.tucsonastronomy.org, for a link to Psaltis' interview on gravity that aired on NPR's Science Friday program in 2007.
The association meets the first Friday of every month at the Steward Observatory lecture hall, 933 N. Cherry Ave.
Contact Tim Hunter at skyspy@azstarnet.com
