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FARGO — A clear night sky is a thing of breathtaking beauty. The moon and the planets visible to the unaided eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) appear as unblinking discs. All the stars we can see have a distinct twinkle because they are so far away they appear as points of light even though all the stars in the night sky are much larger than our own sun.

The stars are so far away that only extremely bright stars are visible to us without binoculars or a telescope. The most distant star we can see with the naked eye is V762 Cas and it is 16,000 light years away and is 100,000 times more luminous than our sun. the most distant thing we can see with the naked eye is the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way.



Andromeda appears as a faint, fuzzy patch although it is composed of about a trillion stars and is two and a half million light years away..

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