It has also been called Persea ("Perseus's wife") or Cepheis ("Cepheus's daughter"), all names that refer to Andromeda's role in the Greco-Roman myth of Perseus, in which Cassiopeia, the queen of Ethiopia, bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the Nereids, sea nymphs blessed with incredible beauty. It was known as Mulier Catenata ("chained woman") in Latin and al-Mar'at al Musalsalah in Arabic. Īndromeda is known as "the Chained Lady" or "the Chained Woman" in English. The stars that make up Pisces and the middle portion of modern Andromeda formed a constellation representing a fertility goddess, sometimes named as Anunitum or the Lady of the Heavens. The uranography of Andromeda has its roots most firmly in the Greek tradition, though a female figure in Andromeda's location had appeared earlier in Babylonian astronomy. Andromeda as depicted in Urania's Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c. 1825, showing the constellation from the inside of the celestial sphere Andromeda depicted in an early scientific manuscript, c.1000 As was conventional for celestial atlases of the time, the constellation is a mirror image of modern maps as it was drawn from a perspective outside the celestial sphere. History and mythology Johannes Hevelius's depiction of Andromeda, from the 1690 edition of his Uranographia. Andromeda is the location of the radiant for the Andromedids, a weak meteor shower that occurs in November. In Chinese astronomy, the stars that make up Andromeda were members of four different constellations that had astrological and mythological significance a constellation related to Andromeda also exists in Hindu mythology. The Blue Snowball Nebula, a planetary nebula, is visible in a telescope as a blue circular object. Several fainter galaxies, including M31's companions M110 and M32, as well as the more distant NGC 891, lie within Andromeda. The constellation's most obvious deep-sky object is the naked-eye Andromeda Galaxy (M31, also called the Great Galaxy of Andromeda), the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and one of the brightest Messier objects. Only marginally dimmer than Alpha, Beta Andromedae is a red giant, its color visible to the naked eye. Its brightest star, Alpha Andromedae, is a binary star that has also been counted as a part of Pegasus, while Gamma Andromedae is a colorful binary and a popular target for amateur astronomers. This is over 1,400 times the size of the full moon, 55% of the size of the largest constellation, Hydra, and over 10 times the size of the smallest constellation, Crux. It is one of the largest constellations, with an area of 722 square degrees. Because of its northern declination, Andromeda is visible only north of 40° south latitude for observers farther south, it lies below the horizon. Andromeda is most prominent during autumn evenings in the Northern Hemisphere, along with several other constellations named for characters in the Perseus myth. Located in the northern celestial hemisphere, it is named for Andromeda, daughter of Cassiopeia, in the Greek myth, who was chained to a rock to be eaten by the sea monster Cetus. Visible at latitudes between + 90° and − 40°.īest visible at 21:00 (9 p.m.) during the month of November.Īndromeda is one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century Greco-Roman astronomer Ptolemy, and one of the 88 modern constellations.
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