What was andromeda

In the view of the woman, Perseus was astonished:. When Perseus her beheld as marble he would deem her, but the breeze moved in her hair, and from her streaming eyes the warm tears fell. Her beauty so amazed his heart, unconscious captive of her charms, that almost his swift wings forgot to wave. Then, the princess told her story to Perseus, who had already fallen madly in love with her. Andromeda, the princess of Ethiopia was a woman of exceptional beauty, which was the source of her troubles.

In fact, her beauty exceeded human standards to the point that her mother, Cassiopeia, dared to say that she was more beautiful than the Nereids , the female companions of Poseidon.

If you have read Greek Mythology before, you will know, that if the Greek gods hate one thing, that is mortals contending with them. Besides, no mortal had the right to claim to be better than a god at anything. Cepheus consulted the oracle of Ammon who advised the king that the only way to stop the destruction was to sacrifice his daughter to Ketos.

So Cepheus obeyed and had Andromeda chained on a rock next to the sea where Perseus found her. However, the moment he freed her, the earth shook and the gigantic monster Ketos rose from the sea. Without losing a second, Perseus attacked the beast. He climbed on its back and pierced the skull of Ketos with his sickle. There is also a 6th century BCE Corinthian vase showing Perseus throwing rocks at Ketos which clearly shows that at that point in time, the myth had not been crystallized.

Nevertheless, the outcome remained the same in all the different versions; Perseus killed the monster and freed Andromeda. In any case, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, the parents of Andromeda agreed with the union of Perseus and Andromeda who were madly in love after meeting each other a few hours earlier. It is perhaps most logical to assume that Mela used an older source to provide him with the information about the bones and was blissfully unaware of their removal.

There is however a third, more cynical option, namely that either the civic authorities in Iope made sure they replaced the skeleton that Scaurus had taken along or that there had always been more than one skeleton at the site. The learned reader will know the story. And in light of the nature of the countryside, it is said quite rightly that the prophet came from a direction that is mountainous and precipitous, and went down to Joppa in the plain.

The water is close to the sea, and the account which the natives give of the spring is that Perseus, after destroying the sea-monster, to which the daughter of Cepheus was exposed, washed off the blood in the spring.

As we will see later, it would not have been the only rationalization in the context of the myth of Andromeda at Iope, as even the appearance of the sea-monster itself has been subject to such a process.

As regards the divine name itself, Ceto, this is most likely to have been connected to that of Derceto, whom Pliny mentions elsewhere in his work as the interpretatio Graeca of Atargatis of Hierapolis, 40 though not with any hint of a connection with the Ceto he mentions at Iope. Much later, Nonnus Dion. For there were two brothers, Cepheus and Phineus, and the kingdom of Cepheus was then in what was later renamed Phoinike but at that time was Iopa, taking its name from the town Iope next to the sea.

And the borders of the kingdom extended from the sea on our side as far as the Arabs who dwell next to the Red Sea. Cepheus also had a very beautiful daughter Andromeda, and both Phoinix and Phineus, the brother of Cepheus, courted her. After many rounds of deliberation concerning each of them, Cepheus decided to give her to Phoinix and to conceal his own acquiescence [in the matter] by means of an abduction carried out by the suitor.

And Andromeda was snatched from a certain desert island to which she was accustomed to go to offer sacrifices to Aphrodite. Perseus, the son of Danae, who just happened to be sailing by, put in, and overcome with pity and love for the girl at first glance, destroyed the ship Ketos and killed the sailors who had been all but petrified with terror.

He then married Andromeda and she sailed away to Greece with Perseus, and under his rule Argos was settled. The local issues are generally little known and not well preserved, but we have a specimen from the late Severan period with a legend showing that the city had acquired the additional name Flavia , 70 reflecting a re-foundation under Vespasian or his sons following its destruction [twice] in the course of the Jewish war.

In any case, in the early third century Perseus was depicted with the head of the Gorgon in his hand [ pl. II ], and also his protective goddess, Athena, appears then on the local coinage [ pl. III ]. Though some early scholars have preferred to see Poseidon in the image, Andromeda makes of course more sense in this particular local context. Coin of Iope, issued under Caracalla. From M eshorer , p. Coin of Iope, issued under Alexander Severus. Reverse showing Athena.

Drawing of autonomous coin of Iope. Reverse showing Andromeda chained on her rock. As the first of the mosaics to be discovered, in the late s, in a house behind the temple of Bel, the one from Palmyra [ pl. V ] was originally interpreted, quite naturally it seemed at the time, as a depiction of the familiar story that saw Cassiepeia boasting that she was more beautiful than the Nereids, with the consequence that Poseidon who was depicted in the centre of the circular mosaic, above Cassiepeia [ pl.

VI ] got very angry and sent a sea-monster in revenge, with a dire effect for Andromeda. VII ] and at Apamea [ pl. Kasios, the best renowned mountain top of the Syrian lands.

The three mosaics provide, then, a unique panorama of a mixture between on the one hand Oriental cosmological conceptions and on the other the neo-Platonic theory of the transmigration of the souls. This mixture could, according to Balty, only have come into existence in the particular circumstances of Palmyra, where the philosopher Longinus spent the last years of his life, under the aegis of the intellectual openness of queen Zenobia, and where he may have developed the idea soon after the death of Plotinus in ca From Palmyra the concept would have spread to elsewhere in the wider region, resulting in the mosaics from Nea Paphos and Apamea.

But what would the inhabitants of Iope have thought of this spin on the story? With Cassiepeia winning the beauty contest and Poseidon acting as a sophisticated judge rather than sending the sea-monster in revenge of her slight of the Nereids, there would have been no due consequences for her daughter Andromeda, and hence no basis for the myth of Andromeda at Iope.

Surely they would have been more appreciative had they knew them of the mosaics from Daphne near Antioch and from Zeugma, which show, following the traditional myth, Perseus saving Andromeda from the defeated sea-monster. M32 is small, but quite bright, and can easily be seen in a small telescope. M32 does not contain any globular clusters.

The galaxy is suspected to have been much larger at one point, but then lost its outer stars and globular clusters when it collided with the Andromeda Galaxy.

M32 is about 6, in diameter and mostly contains old stars, with no star formation going on inside the galaxy. It has a supermassive black hole in its centre. The mass of the black hole is estimated to be between 1. Messier is a dwarf elliptical galaxy. It is often classified as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy. It contains eight globular clusters in the halo that surrounds it.

Atypical for a dwarf elliptical galaxy, M is showing signs of recent star formation. It does not appear to have a supermassive black hole, or at least there is no evidence that one exists at the centre of the galaxy. Messier , image: Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Messier was observed and described by Charles Messier in together with the Andromeda Galaxy and other objects he discovered, but M was not included on his original list of objects.

The galaxy was independently discovered by Caroline Herschel a decade later. Her discovery was documented by her brother William Herschel in , but it was not given a Messier Catalogue number until , when Kenneth Glyn Jones finally gave it one. NGC Caldwell 28 is an open cluster with an apparent magnitude of 5. The cluster was discovered by Caroline Herschel in , but may have been observed by Giovanni Batista Hodierna before NGC is bright, large, and easily seen through binoculars.

In exceptionally good conditions, it is even visible to the unaided eye. None of the stars in the cluster are brighter than 9th magnitude. It is visible in 4. The galaxy has an apparent magnitude of It appears as our own galaxy, the Milky Way, would appear seen edge-on.

It belongs to the NGC Group. A supernova was observed in the galaxy on August 21, It was designated SN J and peaked at magnitude NGC is an open cluster with an apparent magnitude of 5. It is light years distant. The cluster contains about 80 stars and is easily seen with binoculars and small telescopes. It is a planetary nebula with an apparent magnitude of 8. The central star is a bluish dwarf with an estimated temperature of 75, K. The Blue Snowball Nebula can be seen in a small refractor telescope, but only appears as a star-like object with some nebulosity.

Nebulas like these represent a stage in evolution that stars like our Sun undergo when they run out of fuel. Stars are nuclear furnaces that spend most of their lives fusing hydrogen into helium.

Massive stars have fiery fates, ending their lives as supernovae, but medium-mass stars like the Sun swell to become red giants as they exhaust their fuel. The process begins when, after billions of years of nuclear fusion, the star starts to shut down. Gravity no longer balanced by the outward pressure created by nuclear fusion compresses the stellar core. One day the Sun will meet a similar fate, but it has enough fuel to last another 6 billion years or so.

Astronomers compared this image to earlier Hubble images of Caldwell 22 to study how the nebula expanded and changed. Hajian University of Waterloo. The group is located at an approximate distance of million light years. It was discovered in by William Herschel, who catalogued the galaxies as a single object. NGC 68 Group. Home » Astronomy. Andromeda was one of the original 48 constellations cataloged by the Second Century Greek astronomer Ptolemy, and is still one of 88 officially recognized modern constellations.

In all, the constellation contains 65 known stars, 18 of which make up its shape. The most prominent is Alpheratz also known as Sirrah , the brightest star in the constellation. Other named stars include Mirach, Almach, and Adhil. Andromeda contains only three Messier objects, bright deep sky objects identified primarily by French astronomer Charles Messier during the 18th Century. The most famous of these is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, which was named for the constellation.

It is one of the most distant naked-eye objects in the night sky.