Andromeda - Galactic Proof..In 1925, Edwin Hubble disproved the notion that the Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe with his observation of the movement of a cepheid star within the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier catalog object 31 or M31) depicted here. He showed conclusively that Andromeda is an entirely separate galaxy, distinct from the Milky Way. This in turn opened the way for the discovery that the universe is far larger than previously thought (for at least the last thousand years.) We now know there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe. Andromeda is merely our closest neighbor...The written record starts with Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi in 964, whose classification of the Andromeda Galaxy as a nebula codified 1,000 years of limited-scope thinking about the nature of the universe. In 1920, esteemed American scientists Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis took the stage at the Smithsonian to engage in The Great Debate of Astronomy, with Curtis correctly identifying that Andromeda was an "island universe" of its own while Shapley argued that it was merely a gas cloud within our galaxy...More recently the Hubble Space telescope revealed in the 1990's that the great Galaxy in Andromeda is made up of 1 trillion stars, some 2,000 - 4,000 times the number of stars in our vast Milky Way galaxy. M31 has its own satellite galaxies (M32 and M110) with their own mysteries to be explored. M32 and M110 can be seen in this photo as the small bright disks nearest the heart of M31...M31 glows as the second largest object in the night sky - larger than Earth's moon (but quite a bit dimmer.) I "discovered" it for myself four years ago during my first night sky viewing session outside the Kirkwood ski resort in California's Sierras. On a computer I zoomed it to see the smudge in the northwest sky in my wide-angle starscape. It resolved into a spiral galaxy and I was hooked...M31 has no doubt been seen by billions in the northern hemisphere since the dawn of time. Visible every night to half of the earth's population, but most of what we know about it has been learned in the last 20 years. This begs the question of how little we know about our universe, and what other humbling enhancements to our knowledge are yet to be made. The dramatic enlargement of the "known universe" that M31 induced has profound implications for theology and the study of the nature of life that will take some time to trickle down into new, broader conceptions...Steve Lefkovits.January 2013