Referring to Figure 25

Referring to Figure 25, look at the star which is the northeast corner of The Great Square in Pegasus. Projecting away from this corner in a curved V shape is the constellation of Andromeda, The Princess. If the sky you are observing is sufficiently dark, you should be able to see a faint hazy smudge near one of the stars in the middle of the western most leg of the ‘V’. The small oval shown in Figure 25 marks the location of the “smudge” which is the most distant object visible to the unaided eye. What you are seeing is M31, The Great Andromeda Galaxy, the large sister galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. This galaxy is at a distance of 2.3 million light-years away from us. In other words it takes light (traveling at 186,000 miles per second) 2.3 million years to reach us from this galaxy! Thus, when you look at The Great Andromeda Galaxy the image you are seeing is 2.3 million years old.