This time of year you have the best chance to see with the naked eye the thing that is farthest away in our Butler night sky.

Away from heavy city lights in the countryside, look in the southeastern sky in the early evening and you may see the Andromeda galaxy, next door neighbor to our Milky Way.

Remember the movie "The Andromeda Strain"? Well, that's what your eyes will have to do to spot this grand island of stars.

A couple weeks ago in this Skywatch column I featured the constellations Pegasus the Winged Horse and Andromeda the Princess that are literally linked together.

The main part of Pegasus is called the "Square of Pegasus." Look for the square orientated diagonally in the southeastern sky. It's easy to see because the stars that make it up are some of the brightest in that area.

Next, look for two curved lines of stars that arc off to the left of the star Alpheratz on the left corner of the Square of Pegasus.

The lower arc of stars is much brighter than the upper arc. The lower arc outlines the wings of Pegasus the Winged Horse. The fainter upper arc outlines Princess Andromeda. There's a whole long Greek mythology/soap opera story that goes with this that I attempted to tell you a couple weeks ago.

Anyway, the best way to find Andromeda is to follow the lower line or wing of the horse two stars to the left of Alpheratz. You'll come to the star Mirach which is fairly bright.

Look for the next two brightest stars you can see above Mirach, and just to the upper right of those two stars look for a small misty patch of light that kind of looks like a tiny cloud.

That's it! That's the Andromeda galaxy.

If you can't see it with the naked eye or you're forced to look for it through city lighting, all is not lost. Take a small telescope or even a halfway decent pair of binoculars and scan that part of sky. That should do it for you.

Now I guarantee it's not going to wow you all that much. All you'll see is a ghostly patch of light. Even with the large telescopes that I bring to my stargazing parties, you're not going to see it that much better.

The image has a little more shape to it and you can see a brighter nucleus, but that's about it. It's certainly not one of the prime telescope targets in the sky.I've included a picture of Andromeda that I took with my astrophotography system. This is actually a combined series of 30 second exposures which always reveals much more detail. Our human eyes, even looking through even a large telescope, can only accumulate so much light.Nonetheless, that little ghostly patch of light is made up of the collective light of possibly more than a trillion stars at a distance of 2.5 million light years away.If you're new to Skywatch, just one light-year equals nearly six trillion miles. Since a light-year is defined as the distance light travels in a year's time, the light that you're seeing from Andromeda has been traveling to your eyes for 2.5 million years. We don't see it as it is now, but the way it looked 2.5 million years ago.From what astronomers know about galaxy lifetimes it doesn't change that much in appearance, even over a couple million years.Despite that incredible distance, the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way are the closest neighbors to each other, but without a doubt Andromeda is larger, possibly twice the diameter of our Milky Way.Like our home galaxy most of the mass that makes up Andromeda is invisible, what astronomers call dark matter, which remains a big mystery.The Andromeda galaxy is very important to the history of astronomical discovery. Less than 100 years ago, the Milky Way galaxy was all we thought there was to the universe.What we now know as the Andromeda galaxy was then thought to be just a big cloud of nebulosity. That all changed in the 1920s when Edwin Hubble and his assistant, Henrietta Leavitt, discovered that Andromeda was a heck of a lot farther away than previously believed.They used what is known as Cepheid variable stars to gauge just how far away Andromeda was. Cepheid variable stars vary in size and brightness over a period related to average brightness. They're what astronomers call "standard candles."As it turned out, through painstaking observation and photographic analysis, Cepheid variable stars were found in the Andromeda nebula. By observing their brightening and dimming cycle it was determined that the Andromeda nebulae was much farther away.Furthermore, it was concluded that it was a whole other galaxy of stars independent of our Milky Way. Hubble gets all the credit for this discovery but Leavitt actually discovered the Cepheid variables in Andromeda and did most of the labor intensive legwork.One more thing about Andromeda, and yet one more thing you can worry about. The Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy are on a collision course. They're approaching each other at an estimated 50 miles a second!At that rate they will collide and merge in about four billion years. Maybe you shouldn't wait up for it.Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the book, "Pennsylvania Starwatch," available at bookstores and at his Web site, www.lynchandthestars.com.

Andromeda galaxy