Andromeda

th3 s1aught3r

Is this galaxy visible in the Irish night sky at the moment?
Also, does anyone know where exactly to find it? I have a small pair of bonoculars so nothing too powerful

cartman51773

Yes, it's possible if your sky is dark enough. It doesn't have to be pitch black, but city lights are glaring as well as brightening the sky, so your eyes don't open as well with those around.
Find somewhere shady so the lights don't affect your eyes.
Best way to find the Andromeda galaxy is to go star-hopping.
Find the Great Square of Pegasus, which isn't difficult because it's a big square of four bright-ish stars that looks a bit empty and dark and gloomy inside it. You can see it at some time of night for most of the year but autumn is the best time.
From one star of the square, at the top right, there is a kite, with that star being the bottom end of the kite, which is lying on it's side.
At the other side along the top of the square there is a line of fainter stars leading away from the bright star in the corner, which is called Sirrah and also Alpheratz.
Go three stars along that line including the bright corner star and then turn right along the short line of stars you come to and look a little bit away from it so that area falls on the most sensitive part of the eye, which isn't in the middle, it's a bit to the side. Doing that is called using averted vision and it lets us see fainter things than we can see with the rest of the retina. It's quite hard to start with to keep the vision averted like that because we naturally look straight towards things we want to look at, not to one side, but it comes with practice.
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is there in that little line of stars, a soft glow about half the size of the Moon if the sky isn't pitch black and a bit bigger in a really dark sky.
With small binoculars it looks better and with 10x50 or 7x50 binoculars on a really dark clear night it looks great. Bigger than the Moon.

djhaxman

Use Stellarium - a free to download night sky map to tell you where anything is in the sky. Very handy little piece of software.