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RoastedRhino t1_jdva5rd wrote

Reply to comment by p-d-ball in Everyone talks about how huge Andromeda will look in the sky billions of years from now. I present you what the Milky Way *currently* looks like in the skies of our neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. We appear absolutely huge in their skies! [Simulated view] by lampiaio

It's still much bigger than people think.

We were on a group retreat and I convinced by office mates to look at the sky (we were next to a glacier in one of the darkest skies I have ever seen) and Andromeda is big! The general comment by everybody was "I thought it was something you cannot see without a telescope, or something tiny that you need to enlarge to see". But it's actually a big object in the sky!

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p-d-ball t1_jdvdyej wrote

That's awesome! I'll definitely have to look for it.

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canadave_nyc t1_jdvfye7 wrote

You can barely see Andromeda as a small ghostly pale splotch with the naked eye in a very dark sky. A slightly more resolved splotch if you use binoculars (you can see the centre splotch plus hazy oval splotch around it). It will be nothing like the well-defined colourful galaxy you see in photos. Just FYI :)

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p-d-ball t1_jdvgqr6 wrote

Ah, ok. Thank you for the info!

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canadave_nyc t1_jdvmzaq wrote

You're welcome. Here's kind of what it looks like in actuality (although even this photo shows it brighter than it actually is--the stars in the photo, for example, are brighter than they'd appear even at a very dark-sky site): https://p1-tt.byteimg.com/origin/pgc-image/26a4289388a84090929e80b9fcbc930b.jpg

It really just looks like a small very faint hard-to-find fuzzy ball to the naked eye in real life.

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killinghorizon t1_je1oawv wrote

The link seems to be broken.

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canadave_nyc t1_je2jitd wrote

Hmmm, that's odd--I tested it and it was broken for me too, but I just tried again and it seems to be working. Maybe it was temporarily down?

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Laxziy t1_jdxjbzl wrote

It’s still a beautiful splotch tho

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GraveSlayer726 t1_je0h7s7 wrote

really makes you realize the absurd scale of galaxies, even being so far away andromeda can still take up a tremendous amount of space in the sky, i hope i can go someone with little to no light pollution one day to see it

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