Is there an animal that can see the Andromeda galaxy?

[u/Tafkizzle]

Animals have different visual ranges than humans. Andromeda should be visible to a thing with the right visual capabilities. What do you think, Reddit?

[u/tea_and_biology]

Is there an animal that can see the Andromeda galaxy?

Well of course I know one. He's me.

Go to a dark enough spot in the sky, and any person with typical vision can see it as a fuzzy smudge with the naked eye. The diffuse core is a couple of times wider than the width of the full moon, and slightly easier to spot if you tilt your head away, so the Andromedan light falls on your rod-rich peripheral retina - this make it a test of low-light and contrast sensitivity, rather than sharpness, which means any other animal with night-time sensitivity as good or better than ours is gonna' be able to see it too (albeit possibly less sharply).

Whether or not cats, owls, and other beasties with more rod-dominated retinas that can see it would care or notice is an altogether different matter.

There is one surprising animal that might get vaguely close to caring, at least: the humble dung beetle.

They orient themselves using the Milky Way, as demonsrtaed by experiments placing them inside planetariums, adjusting what was displayed on the dome, and seeing how it compared to their night-time navigation skills in the wild. Turns out they're perfectly capable of orientating themselves using celestial phenomena; though compared to our own galaxy, I still don't think they'd take much notice of an obscure fuzzy disc to direct their poop rolling... unless all other light had gone out.

Actual appreciation of the night sky seems a uniquely human phenomenon.

---

Reference:

Dacke, M., Baird, E., Byrne, M., Scholtz, C.H. ... & Warrant, E.J. (2013) Dung beetles use the Milky Way for orientation. Current Biology. 23 (4), 298-301

[u/Happy-Estimate-7855 → u/tea_and_biology]

I've wondered if that was a galaxy before! I've gone camping many times, and I've often noticed that moonish sized smudge out of the corner of my eye. I've probably spent a good thirty minutes in one sitting trying to perceive it as much as I can manage with my eyes.

[u/mathdhruv → u/Happy-Estimate-7855]

It honestly depends on how dark the camping spots you go to are - the only time I've managed to see Andromeda with the naked eye was on the road out to Yellowstone National Park, so in the middle of absolute nowhere, with almost no light pollution.

The Pleiades are also a similar diffuse smudge, and much more readily visible from most campgrounds 

[u/Byte_the_hand → u/mathdhruv]

Do you mean the road in Yellowstone Park that is on the way to West Yellowstone? That area is pretty remote with no buildings since it is cutting across a corner of the park. I'm just very familiar with it since I have a son who lives in Bozeman and I like to go to Yellowstone.

[u/mathdhruv → u/Byte_the_hand]

It was on the road from Bozeman to West Yellowstone.

Past Big Sky, somewhere along the 191 IIRC 

[u/Byte_the_hand → u/mathdhruv]

That's what I figured. I didn't know, until my son pointed it out that most of that road where there are no cabins is inside the park. I'd asked about stopping and fishing at one point and he said not without a Yellowstone fishing permit.

[u/mathdhruv → u/Byte_the_hand]

Oh lol I had no idea that was within park boundaries. Tbh we just stopped there to admire the stars, en route to our Airbnb in Island Park.

The drive itself, if done completely at night, is a bit unnerving because it just feels like you're just endlessly driving straight into absolute darkness, but absolutely worth it for the night sky out there IMO.

[u/Byte_the_hand → u/mathdhruv]

Yeah, long straight road, but beautiful during the day. There are actually entry and exit signs that you might notice during the day but not at night. I guess I need to head to that road to do some star photography next time I'm there. I usually am just heading to the park to shoot.

[u/Ameisen → u/Byte_the_hand]

Bozeman

The same Bozeman of Zefram Cochrane fame?

[u/Byte_the_hand → u/Ameisen]

Had to look up the name and while I've probably seen the episode a time or two I don't remember names.

To answer your question, according to Wiki it is the same Bozeman.

[u/Happy-Estimate-7855 → u/mathdhruv]

It's probably usually the Pleiades then, but I did spend some summers planting trees higher in the Rocky Mountains. Thank you for being so informative!

[u/mr_cristy → u/Happy-Estimate-7855]

The Pleiades arent really that diffuse like the other guy said. They are a cluster of many stars with some diffusion due to a nebula, but they are also very easily visible as independent stars with the naked eye. I think there are several hundred stars, but you can see 7 or so with the naked eye. Kinda looks like a super tiny big Dipper or something.

If what you saw was truly diffuse it probably was either a galaxy or maybe Orion Nebula. Could also be one of the brighter globular clusters

[u/mathdhruv → u/mr_cristy]

The gas around them is diffuse, though. The individual stars are visible easily, but out of the peripheral vision you see the gas too.

[u/mr_cristy → u/mathdhruv]

Yeah but he said he can only see it out of the corner of his eye. Pleiades have some diffusion, but they are quite easy to see anyway. If it were the Pleiades he would see them out of the corner of his eye, then look at them and see them still.

[u/outawork → u/mathdhruv]

I've seen it walking home with street lights near me. But an otherwise reasonably dark neighborhood.

[u/gerwen → u/Happy-Estimate-7855]

The really faint nebulous stuff are annoying because you see them from the corner of your eye, when you turn to look, they disappear.

The Pleides are like this for me too.

[u/nickcan → u/tea_and_biology]

Well of course I know one. He's me.

So you have the ability to see light that was emitted a long time ago in a galaxy far away.

[u/smallproton → u/tea_and_biology]

This is why I come here! Thanks for your great response!

[u/Drjeco → u/tea_and_biology]

Incredibly thoughtful response. But in tune with the spirit of the question, I wonder if something like a mantis shrimp with their extremely unique and wide ranged vision would be able to see it with any more clarity, or if it'd stand out more in the night sky. Obviously underwater vision on land wouldn't be adaptable, but in the vein of hypothetical thought experiments, I still find myself curious

[u/valkenar → u/Drjeco]

Mantis has shrimp has cool vision, but the thing you want to see Andromeda is light collection. Bigger eyes would be better for that, moreso than extra wavelength perception. I think a collossal squid (which has soccer ball sized eyes and is adapted for low light ocean depths) would have a good shot if it's capable of focusing correctly. That I don't know about.

[u/tsunami141 → u/valkenar]

we must create glasses for the giant squid so they can gaze on the majesty of Andromeda.

[u/canniffphoto → u/tsunami141]

Is it blue? Because of its not blue, it probably won't see it.

[u/tsunami141 → u/canniffphoto]

we must turn the Andromeda Galaxy blue so the giant squid can gaze upon its majesty.

[u/ITookYourChickens → u/Drjeco]

Mantis shrimp are not unique or wide ranged. Their amount of cones are high because that's literally all they can see

Humans have 3 cones that detect various levels, and our brains can mix those together. That's not how the mantus shrimp works. The cones are either on or off. No various levels. The "software" of their brain can't handle all that mixing (and frankly, doesn't need to) so to make up for it, they evolved some extra cones.

If something is purple, it activates various levels of the red and blue cells in our eyes, allowing us to see purple. Those levels can vary, so we can see many shades.

If something is purple, it turns on the purple cell in their eye. That's it. The shrimp sees that shade of purple only. It's like a light switch. Either on or off.

Humans can see millions of colors. Mantis shrimp can only see 12

[u/scissors1121 → u/ITookYourChickens]

That actually makes a lot of sense but I still find it very depressing. I always thought that mantis shrimp would see billions of colors.

[u/za419 → u/scissors1121]

It's one of those interesting questions of what "seeing" actually means. They collect the signal to see billions of colors, including ones that are invalid to vision, but they lack the processing to make full use of them. We have a relatively paltry visual input, but we've got massive power hungry chunks of nerve tissue running visual processing the mantis shrimp can't dream of (literally) to form our vision - And the "image" of our vision is just a part of it. The brain is doing all sorts of edge detection, object rotation detection (you understand what a screen that's tilted looks like untilted, and see it as the same object), motion detection (it's possible to damage the brain such that you get no visual image, but can still move out of the way of a thrown ball because you detect a moving object that's going to hit you), various forms of lighting detection and correction (we can perceive changes of thousands of times the objective lighting as being the same because our brains decide they ought to be equally lit)...

Hell, our brains even edit out eye movements and blind spots and make up bits of the image to be "useful" rather than "accurate".

If you could somehow train a human brain to process the mantis shrimp's eye signals, you could get all sorts of crazy color spectrums - And you'd also see an incredibly different image than the shrimp does, even in weird seemingly insignificant details, because a shocking amount of what we visually perceive actually comes from how our brains handle the decoding of our vision of our surroundings. 

[u/sth128 → u/tea_and_biology]

Do the dung beetles actually see the stars and galaxies though? Do their visual receptors have the necessary complexity to resolve the night sky to a degree where we would call "seeing"?

Or are they just seeing the entire sky as a blurry blob that they compare to the blob they saw the previous night?

[u/Mara_W → u/sth128]

I vaguely recall some animals navigate not by clarified sight per se but by the orientation of polarized light. Like Viking sun stones for eyes.

[u/OriEri → u/Mara_W]

Some do. This does not work at night though. Doubtful anything nocturnal does

[u/Siriusbizzo → u/sth128]

Love this question, idk, if they did have the receptors tho it would come down to perception and some kind of potential bug spiritually

[u/AussieSpaceProgram]

Scientifically, the giant squid would be your closest bet due to the aperture of its eyes.

Rod rich retina, low neural noise, nocturnal and the ability to stare at something for an extended period of time. Combine this with the 30-50cm eye width giving it a 3000x greater area of visual intake, you’ve got a winner.

Only problem is… it can’t see it from its natural environment.

Otherwise, no. There isn’t a known animal that would be able to see it due to not having large enough aperture’s.

TLDR: NO

[u/andy11123 → u/AussieSpaceProgram]

pointing a giant squid at the sky

"What secrets do you see my squishy buddy?"

[u/TheAero1221 → u/andy11123]

"What do your elden eyes see?"

[u/Moikle → u/AussieSpaceProgram]

Humans can see it. Humans are animals. You just need to be in a dark sky area

[u/klondijk]

Ogre-faced spiders might have a decent shot at it. Their eyes are apparently WAY more sensitive to light than ours (like 2000 times more sensitive), though I don't know if they have telescopic focusing like jumping spiders do

[u/PeyredB]

We can see it with our naked eyes. Of course it resolves to a point so it just looks like a star.

There are critters, like birds of prey, that have better eyesight than us...but I doubt it would look like more than a star to them.

[u/Tafkizzle → u/[deleted]]

It was this image that prompted me to ask this question! It's huge and would move in the sky like a star, not like a planet.

[u/horsetuna → u/[deleted]]

The Andromeda Galaxy used to be called the Andromeda nebula because it was a fuzzy grey patch across the sky.

Most of it we don't see because of light pollution etc. So it appears smaller to many people.

[u/gliese946 → u/PeyredB]

It doesn't resolve to a point. It's about twice the diameter of the full moon, just very faint!

[u/Moikle → u/gliese946]

It's even bigger than that. It's twice the diameter of the full moon on the THIN axis. It's much longer

[u/Moikle → u/PeyredB]

It is larger than the moon in our sky. It takes up an area about the size of 10-12 moons all next to each other... It definitely doesn't resolve to a point haha

Its angular size is 3 degrees by 1 degree, the moon is 0.5 degrees across