Public Posts

Welcome to the Kudos 365 History Challenge. Test your knowledge and see how many you can answer.

Looking through these three windows on history reminds us that while the tools of civilization evolve, the human story continues to be driven by many of the same hopes, challenges, and ambitions that have shaped every generation. Continue reading 

Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, and I
—Ah, how poets sing and die!

Anne Bethel Spencer (born Bannister) (1882 – 1975). American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. She was born in Henry County, Virginia. She was the first Virginian and one of three African American women included in the highly influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). Her writing was elegant and of the classical style. While a librarian at the all-black Dunbar High School, a position she held for 20 years, she supplemented the original three library books by bringing others from her own collection at home. She was an important member of the Harlem Renaissance and she was instrumental in reviving the chapter of the NAACP in Lynchburg, Virginia, along with her husband Edward, close friend Mary Rice Hayes Allen and others.

This poem is in the public domain.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes we can all use a little help from a friend. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory needs a boost to stay in orbit after almost 22 years of service. This video shows an artist's visualization of the Swift Boost Mission: The Katalyst's LINK spacecraft was launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on July 3 and it is now en route to rendezvous with Swift and boost it to a higher orbit over the course of the next several months. This type of maneuver has never been attempted before. If successful, it will be the technology demonstration of a new key capability to extended the lifetime of spacecraft in low Earth orbit, whose orbits decay over time. Swift has an array of instruments that observe the most energetic explosions in the Universe in gamma-rays, X-rays and ultraviolet, and the unique ability to repoint in their direction within tens of seconds. Astronomers around the world, and indeed all fans of cosmic explosions, are anxiously hoping for a successful mission!

Watch NASA's Astronomy Video of the Day

The Lower Vistula Valley in Kokocko, Poland.

Mariusz Guć, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Where can you find dragons fighting in the night sky? In the southern constellation of the Altar: Ara. The dragons are, of course, actually made of suggestively shaped gas and dust. The celestial home of the mythological battling beasts is cataloged as NGC 6188 and located about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud. Massive, young stars of the embedded Ara OB1 association were formed there only a few million years ago, sculpting the dark shapes and powering the nebular glow with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. Joining NGC 6188 on this cosmic canvas, visible toward the lower right, is unusual emission nebula NGC 6164, also created by one of the region's massive stars. This impressively wide field picture, captured from Queensland, Australia, spans over 2 degrees (four full Moons).

Photo by Rod Prazeres

Seed pods of a Silene dioica. Focus stack of 40 photos.

Dominicus Johannes Bergsma., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Photo by Julien Looten