While the images are fascinating and beautiful, I have to wonder what the sky would really look like if we could see it at that time. Today, from a dark location the unaided eye can see the Andromeda galaxy as a tiny smudge of light, but all we see is the bright core. If we could see its full extent, it would be three times the size of the full moon. (See my stargazing article, What the Eye Doesn’t See.) The Milky Way itself is a haze to the eye and not very bright. It’s one of the first things washed out by even modest light pollution. So as Andromeda gets nearer and nearer, will its spiral structure truly be visible in the sky, or will it look like a larger and larger oval fuzz, with its outermost regions still mostly invisible to the eye? I suspect that’s the case. It might be interesting to see projected surface brightnesses for different parts of the Andromeda galaxy at different distances. But alas, I’m not the one to calculate them.