The time I mistook sun for the Andromeda Galaxy

Makes me think of Shakespeare's mistress’ eyes

This is one of my strangest memories.

I can' be sure exactly how old I was at the time, but I was very young. My family was living in Derry, New Hampshire, at that time, and I was out on the deck behind our house with my sister Crystal, who is one year younger than me. My mother was in the house taking care of the baby (my brother Luther, who is about three years younger than me), and there was no one else in the house. My youngest two siblings hadn't been born yet, so I can't have been older than four -- and probably closer to three, given that Luther was still "the baby."

Anyway, Crystal and I saw a large shining object hovering above us in the sky, and we stared at it for several minutes trying to figure out what it could possibly be. Finally, I went downstairs to the small bookcase in the living room where the field guides were kept, took out the Field Guide to the Night Sky (never mind that it was daytime), and thumbed through it until I found a picture that looked like the object we had seen. Then I found my mother and had her read the caption to me.

"It's -- uh -- the Andromeda Galaxy," she said. (I remember she stressed the first and third syllables, which I would much later learn was not the standard pronunciation.) "Why do you ask?"

"Crys and I saw it out on the deck."

This understandably roused my mother's curiosity and concern, and so she followed me back out onto the deck, where Crys was still looking up at the thing.

"My goodness! That's the sun! Stop looking at it, or you'll hurt your eyes!"

And so we went back into the house, and that was that.

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The reader will have observed that the Andromeda Galaxy is, to coin a phrase, nothing like the sun, and that -- most heavenly bodies being spherical -- a Field Guide to the Night Sky would surely contain any number of pictures that look much more like the sun than the Andromeda Galaxy does.

In my memory, the thing we were looking at looked like -- the sun -- round and white, with nothing at all to suggest a barred spiral galaxy. The only unusual thing about it was that it was shining though clouds thick enough that its light was paled somewhat, making it possible to look at it directly, but thin enough that the solar disc was clearly visible. It was a white circle with clearly defined edges, looking a bit more like the moon than like the sun as it usually appears. But it never occurred to me, or my sister, to guess that it was the sun, or even the moon. Somehow, out of all the stars and planets and things in that field guide, I decided it was the Andromeda Galaxy that it most closely resembled.