ANDROMEDA  , in

Greek legend, the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia (Cassiope, Cassiepeia), king and queen of the Ethiopians . Cassiopeia, having boasted herself equal in beauty to the Nereids, drew down the vengeance of Poseidon, who sent an inundation on the land and a sea-monster which destroyed man and beast . The oracle of Ammon having announced that no relief would be found until the king exposed his daughter Andromeda to the monster, she was fastened to a rock on the shore . Here Perseus, returning from having slain the Gorgon, found her, slew the monster, set her free, and married her in spite of Phineus, to whom she had before been promised . At the wedding a quarrel took place between the rivals, and Phineus was turned to stone by the sight of the Gorgon's head (Ovid, Metam. v . 1) . Andromeda followed her husband to Tiryns in Argos, and became the ancestress of the family of the Perseidae . After her death she was placed by Athena amongst the constellations in the northern sky, near Perseus and Cassiopeia . Sophocles and Euripides (and in modern times Corneille) made the story the subject of tragedies, and its incidents were represented in numerous ancient works of art . Apollodorus ii . 4; Hyginus, Fab . 64; Ovid, Metam. iv .

662; Fedde, De Perseo et Andromeda (1860) . The Greeks personified the

constellation Andromeda as a woman with her arms extended and chained . Its Latin names are Persea, Muller catenata (" chained woman "), Virgo devota, &c.; the Arabians replaced the woman by a seal; Wilhelm Schickard (1592—1635) named the constellation " Abigail "; Julius Schiller assigned to it the figure of a sepulchre, naming it the "Holy Sepulchre." In 1786 Johann Elert Bode formed a new constellation, named the " Honours of Frederick," after his patron Frederick II., out of certain stars situated in the arm of Ptolemy's Andromeda; this innovation found little favour and is now discarded . Twenty-three stars are catalogued by Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe; Hevelius increased this number to forty-seven, while Flamsteed gave sixty-six . The most brilliant stars are a Andromedae or " Andromeda's head," and (3 Andromedae in the girdle (Arabic mirach or mizar), both of the second magnitude; y Andromedae in the foot (alamak or alhames), of the third magnitude . Scientific interest centres mainly on the following: the nebula in Andromeda, one of the finest in the sky (see NEBULA); y Andromedae, the finest binary in the heavens, made up of a yellow star of magnitude 2-1, and a blue-green of magnitude 51, the latter being itself binary; Nova Andromedae, a "new" star, discovered in the nebula by C . E . A . Hartwig in 1885, and subsequently spectroscopically examined by many observers; R Andromedae, a regularly variable star; and the Andromedids, a meteoric swarm, associated with Biela's comet, and having their radiant in this constellation (see METEOR) .