Ever wonder how far you can see with the naked eye? Unfortunately, most people never see beyond the horizon (or even beyond arm's length!) but by looking in just the right place in a dark night sky from midsummer to early winter, you can see something over 2 million light years away. (That's over 1,300,000,000,000,000 miles!!!) The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object visible to the naked eye. It appears as a cloudy smudge just above the constellation of Andromeda (which I tend to picture as the "back legs" of the horse, Pegasus.) It is the brightest and nearest of all spiral galaxies, and is the first object to have been definitely identified as being outside our own galaxy when Dr. Edwin Hubble, in 1923, used the study of Cepheid variables within the "Andromeda Nebula" to deduce a distance of at least 900,000 light years. Further study has since increased that distance. Also in this photograph can be seen two "satellite" galaxies of Andromeda. M32 is an elliptical galaxy which appears as the bright "star" to the left of the center of M31. NGC 205 is also an elliptical galaxy which appears as the oval blob to the lower right of the image. By analyzing the light curve at the center of M31, scientists have determined that a black hole containing the mass of 30 million suns lurks there. A black hole of about 3 million solar masses is thought to exist at the center of M32. This image was taken in September, 1994 using a Nikon 400mm f/2.8 lens mounted on a Losmandy G-11 mount and manually guided for 1 hour using a Vixen 90mm refractor as a guide scope. The film used was un-hypered Fujicolor 800, and the observing site was a mountaintop in West Virginia above Lost River State Park. 3 images were scanned and stacked together using the program Registar to provide a less-noisy image than one negative alone. The resulting stack was then manipulated in Photoshop to enhance the contrast and color saturation.