I’m wondering: What do we see when we look at the night sky? The flickering dust over the dark veil that covers the people we meet, the streets we walk, and the plants that give us shade. Can we really imagine what is out there as a part of our reality? Hubble photographed the Andromeda Galaxie on a 4x5 inch plate, somewhat similar to the ones I used to take these photographs, and the light that arrived through his lens, had travelled two and a half million years. That glow from those stars came to be way before we appeared as an species, and through that journey many other species here have disappeared, we learned how to observe the universe, an uncountable number of people woke up in the morning and did their chores, grew old, ceased to exist, smiled, and looked up to the sky to see that light.

In the late 18th century astronomer Charles Messier made a list of objects that seemed to appear like comets, the subject he was studying, in the night sky but weren’t. Messier 31 was one of them: The Andromeda Nebula. In 1923 Edwin Hubble took a photographic 4x5 inch plate of the object, in which he discovered a type of star that made it possible to calculate the distance the nebula had to earth. It located the object two and a half million light years away and that became the evidence that there was a universe outside our own galaxy.

Now we know this object as the Andromeda Galaxy.