The charming Princess Andromeda wears her chains in the sky just as she did upon the sea-shore of the earth, only as a constellation she has a line of pretty yellow stars on which to rest, one of the stars lighting her dark hair, one adorning her girdle and one sparkling like a jewel upon her sandal. The head of the Princess lies against the Square of Pegasus, the Winged Horse, and her feet reach out almost to Perseus, who with a ready sword watches her protectingly. The orange star on Andromeda's sandal is the radiant point of the Biela meteors. These appear every year on the 27th of November. This star is a delight to the eye when viewed through a large telescope, for not only one star is disclosed but three--a sea-green and a blue beside the one of orange-gold! Just above Mirach, the star on the girdle, are two fainter stars and a small misty object. A large telescope will show that this misty object is a long shuttle-shaped nebula of the most colossal size. This is the famous nebula of Andromeda, the only spiral nebula in the heavens which may be located without a telescope. The nebula of Andromeda is not a gaseous nebula but an outside universe, an aggregation of millions of suns comparable to the Galaxy. (The Galaxy is our Milky Way.) [Figure 34] This in itself is astounding, but it is also astounding that we have been privileged to gaze over a chasm so wide that an aggregation of millions of suns looks no more to our eyes than a misty spot of light. Dr. Edwin Hubble, of the Mount Wilson observatory in California, has recently made the discovery that the more distant spiral nebulæ may also be resolved into stars. Dr. Hubble made his investigations photographically with the 60-inch and 100-inch telescopes. Although most of the spiral nebulæ appear very small because they are at least a million light years distant, the nebula of Andromeda is comparatively close, its apparent diameter being about six times the diameter of the moon. This famous nebula may be most easily located when near the zenith during the latter part of October. Watch for it just after the star Alpheratz, on the head of Andromeda, has passed the meridian and started toward the west. [Figure 35: THE GREAT NEBULA OF ANDROMEDA. Photograph by Yerkes Observatory through the 40-inch refracting telescope.] To the unaided eye, it appears as a small mass of faint light and inexperienced observers often mistake it for a comet. Although this mass of light may be considered as being comparatively close compared to other spiral nebula, it is scarcely like sighting a ship at sea, for so far away does the spiral of Andromeda lie, that a ray of light must travel at least 36,000 years in order to reach the earth--36,000 years with light traveling 186,000 miles a second! PEGASUS, THE FLYING HORSE [Figure 36]