For the first time in history, around the year 964, a Persian astronomer named Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi wrote down something nobody had catalogued before: a smudge of light that was not a star. He called it a little cloud. In the maps of his book of fixed stars it is a dot drawn inside the mouth of a fish, in a constellation his age called «the chained woman» — lying beside «the bearer of the demon's head», and directly facing «the woman on the chair».
Those were not decorations: behind every name there was a story. And this one is worthy of modern times. Envy, spite, betrayal and heroes.
Rightly so
The tale goes that Cassiopeia, vain as few are, «rightly» insulted the other Nereids by declaring that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful. And that they wore no make-up.
The Nereids took it beautifully, as one can imagine, and went to complain to Poseidon. The god of the sea, «rightly», out of spite — and with his underpants somewhat over his head, given that he had a thing going with one of the Nereids — did not take it out on Cassiopeia. He took it out on her husband: Cepheus, king of Ethiopia. Who was «rightly» forced to sacrifice his virgin daughter.
And so poor, innocent, considerably more modest Andromeda ended up chained to a rock, waiting forever for the sea monster that would devour her. And her mother? Her mother was sentenced to sit — comfortably, «rightly» — upside down right in front of her daughter, watching the meal and despairing for eternity.
Someone is missing. Ah yes: the not-so-blond, not-so-blue-eyed Perseus. Son of Zeus, already famous for beheading Medusa the Gorgon, on his way back from that long errand he spots the virgin Andromeda — beautiful, naked and in chains — and «rightly» falls in love with her eyes. So deeply that he faces the monster, tricking it with shadow-play on the water, and immediately afterwards asks for the girl's hand.
From that union were born Perses, king of the Persians, and Gorgophone, queen of Sparta.
And the little cloud?
Al-Sufi's little cloud is the nearest large galaxy to our own: 2.5 million light years away, a thousand billion stars, more than 200,000 light years across. It is the farthest object visible to the naked eye — the light arriving tonight set out when our species did not yet exist.
In the photograph you can pick out the dark dust lanes tracing the spiral arms and, on either side of the core, two satellite galaxies: M32, compact and bright, and M110, more diffuse. Andromeda and the Milky Way are closing at 110 kilometres per second: in a few billion years they will be a single thing. Cassiopeia, one hopes, will still be there watching.
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