Andromeda and the Pleiades in binoculars

16 October 2026astronomyobserving log

The New Moon was on the 10th, and on the evening of the 14th the crescent was gone from the west by about nine. Clear, cold, no wind. I took the binoculars and a deckchair out to the back step and left the refractor indoors on purpose.

This time of year the two best binocular objects in the sky are up together. Andromeda is high overhead by ten in the evening, and the Pleiades are climbing in the east. Both are too big for a 70 mm telescope at 28 times to show well. At 10x50, with a field of about six and a half degrees, they fit comfortably with room to spare.

Andromeda

Found by star-hopping from the corner of the Square of Pegasus: two stars along the line of Andromeda, turn north, two fainter ones, and the galaxy is just beside the second. In the binoculars it is a bright, small, slightly elongated core, with a fainter oval glow around it that grows the longer you look. Bracing the binoculars against the deckchair arm made the difference between a smudge and a shape. Using averted vision, looking a little to one side, the glow stretched to roughly two degrees, about four full Moons across.

I looked for M32 and M110, the two small companion galaxies, and saw neither with any confidence. I also tried for the Triangulum galaxy, M33, which is a famous test of a dark sky. Nothing. The street lamp wins that one every year.

The light reaching my eye from Andromeda left it about two and a half million years ago. I think about that every time, and it never stops being slightly ridiculous.

The Pleiades

By eleven they were high enough to clear the neighbour's roof. With the naked eye I count six stars from the garden on a good night; I got six this time. In the binoculars there were over thirty, arranged in that small dipper shape with a scatter of fainter stars around it, all a slightly cold blue-white. The cluster is young, around a hundred million years, and it looks it: no ageing orange giants, just hot, bright stars.

The faint haze around the brighter stars that shows up in photographs is a dust cloud the cluster happens to be passing through. I did not see it. I do not expect to see it from here, ever.

Limiting magnitude near the zenith, by the usual count, was about 4.8, which is as good as this garden ever gets. I came in at half past eleven with cold hands and a page of notes, which is the right way round.