If you know where to look and have clear, dark skies you can just barely see Andromeda with the naked eye. Check a star map. Binocs show it quite distinctly, although it will look like a greyish smudge with none of the detail or color of Denny’s pic.
This is interesting: “While even casual skygazers are now inspired by the knowledge that there are many distant galaxies like M31, astronomers seriously debated this fundamental concept only 80 years ago.”
Astronomers in those days didn´t know if galaxies were a part of the Milky Way or isolated islands of their own in the wast universe. As often in astronomy better observational results paved the way for the modern view of the galaxies as the biggest fundamenal structures in the universe.