Constellation
Andromeda
Andromeda is a northern constellation of the chained princess from Greek myth, and home to the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest big galaxy to our own.
The myth
Andromeda was the princess chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster, punishment for her mother Cassiopeia’s boasting, and saved at the last moment by Perseus. Almost the whole family sits together in this corner of the sky. Cassiopeia the queen, Cepheus the king, Perseus the hero, and Pegasus the horse are all close by.
A galaxy you can see with your own eyes
Andromeda holds something genuinely staggering. The Andromeda Galaxy is a separate galaxy of a trillion stars, two and a half million light years away, and it is the most distant object the human eye can see without any help, a faint grey oval. The light landing in your eye left it before our species existed.
It was the Persian astronomer al-Sufi who first wrote it down, in his Book of Fixed Stars in the 10th century, describing it as a little cloud. Nobody knew what it was until the 1920s, when Edwin Hubble measured its distance and showed that it lay far outside our own galaxy. That single measurement proved the Milky Way to be one galaxy among many.
How to find it
Andromeda runs off one corner of the Great Square of Pegasus. Trace two stars out from that corner, then look just above them for the dim glow of the galaxy. From the northern hemisphere it is best on autumn evenings, when it climbs high in the east after dark. From mid northern latitudes it stays up for most of the night at that time of year.
Stars you can find in your chart
Andromeda is not on the zodiac, but its two brightest stars line up with zodiac degrees. By Hali’s 2026 star positions Alpheratz, the princess’s head, sits at 14 degrees of the sign Aries and Mirach, her girdle, at 0 degrees of Taurus. The Sun passes them around 4 and 20 April. Alpheratz is shared with Pegasus, where it once marked the horse’s navel, and its name comes from the Arabic for the horse’s navel.
Common confusions
The Andromeda Galaxy and the constellation Andromeda are different things. The galaxy is one object far beyond our own stars, and the constellation is a pattern of nearby stars that happens to lie in the same direction. The galaxy is also slowly approaching the Milky Way, and the two are expected to merge, but not for billions of years.
Questions
Can I really see the Andromeda Galaxy with my eyes?
Yes, from a dark enough sky. It looks like a faint oval smudge. It is the most distant thing the unaided human eye can see, about two and a half million light years away.
Is Andromeda a zodiac constellation?
No. It sits well north of the Sun's path, so the Sun, Moon and planets never pass through it. Two of its stars do line up with zodiac degrees, though, which is how fixed star astrologers use it.
Sources: Standard references and Greek myth. Hali star positions for 2026.