I first spotted it at about 01:00 Monday morning, while I was in San Stefinos, Corfu. I was looking east, maybe a touch north of east, and only using a pair of 8X25 bino’s and it looked like a small, grey smudge, about the size of my little fingernail and it was really on the very edge of visibility. In fact I could make it out better with my peripheral vision rather than looking directly at it. It never got more than a couple of inches above the horizon but it was there when I looked the next two nights as well.
Not Andromeda, that’s too high in the sky. Not comets Neat or Linear either. The are several naked-eye visible globular clusters in the constellations Ophiuchus and Sagittarius. I think they’d be in about the part of the sky you were looking at.
Maybe M10 ?
No, it probably was Andromeda. The OP was on Corfu, near Greece. Andromeda would be just above the horizon in the northeast at about 1 AM this time of year. M10 would be way up in the sky in the south.
My guess is definitely Andromeda - fits the description perfectly.
It’s probably either M31 (Andromeda) or M33, but I think your best bet is to try an interactive star chart. M31 is farther north than M33. Descriptions of these galaxies:
M33 Triangulum Galaxy or Pinwheel Galaxy
Type: Spiral Galaxy
Constellation: Triangulum
Mag: 5.7 [this is about the limit of naked-eye visibility, depending on how good your eyes are, light pollution, and other factors]
Dimensions: 71’ x 42’ [arc-minutes]
Went and checked my chart for longitude 19, latitude 39 (corfu) at 1 AM. If I did that right, Andromeda is in the northeast, but it’s 25 degrees above the horizon; more than a “couple of inches” unless there are hills involved.
If you can see anything at all above the horizon, it is more than a couple of inches above it, if you take the phrase literally. In my experience, when non-savvy sky observers say an “inch” they mean about ten degrees. It’s an interesting perceptual concept. It means that they perceive the dome to be six inches away–at the end of the binoculars, maybe? So, raising the binoculars an inch would raise the view ten degrees.