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Curious about what happened today in history? Discover highlights from March 4th, including important events and defining moments from around the world.
Love the new UI - it is fun to be able to easily look up specific days, years and months throughout history. I must control me ADHD 😳🙂
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:
If you could fly over the North Pole of Mars, what would you see? Images from ESA’s Mars Express mission in 2019 were compiled into the featured video which shows just such a trip. First you see below you a landscape tinted orange by rusted iron in the fine soil, with some land appearing darker due to exposed rock. Soon the northern polar cap comes into view, mostly white because of its reflective frozen water. Surrounding the polar cap is the North Polar Basin, a layered depression covered with dust and sand. The frames in the featured video were captured during northern Martian Spring when the carbon-dioxide ice is evaporating, leaving the underlying water-ice in the cap. Mars Express continues to study the Martian surface and look for clues about the Red Planet's ancient climate and potential for life.
Doll (musha-ningyo) featuring Takenouchi no Sukune, minister of Emperor Ōjin; end of the Edo period, 19th century, Japan. Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Museum, Dallas (Texas) ; the photograph was taken during an exhibition in the Musée des Arts Premiers in Paris.
Vassil, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:
How well do you know the night sky? OK, but how well can you identify famous sky objects in a very deep image? Either way, here is a test: see if you can find some well-known night-sky icons in a deep image filled with filaments of normally faint dust and gas. This image contains the Pleiades star cluster, Barnard's Loop, Orion Nebula, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Witch Head Nebula, Eridanus Loop, and the California Nebula. To find their real locations, here is an annotated image version. The reason this task might be difficult is similar to the reason it is initially hard to identify familiar constellations in a very dark sky: the tapestry of our night sky has an extremely deep hidden complexity. The featured composite reveals some of this complexity in a 16 hours of sky exposure in dark skies over Granada, Spain. Tonight: Total Lunar Eclipse
Photo by Ignacio Fernández
The historic Geigersberg vineyard, northeast of the Sachsenheim district of Ochsenbach in Germany, still retains many of its old dry stone walls and is home to rare plant and animal species.
Roman Eisele, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.
Edgar Degas - (1834 1917) French Painter, Sculptor, and Printmaker. More than half of his works depict dancers.
Hvítserkur is a 15 m high basalt stack along the eastern shore of the Vatnsnes peninsula, in northwest Iceland. The rock has two holes at the base, which give it the appearance of a dragon who is drinking. The base of the stack has been reinforced with concrete to protect its foundations from the sea. Several species of birds, such as gulls and fulmars, live on at Hvítserkur and its name (“white shirt” in Icelandic) comes from the color of the guano deposited on its rocks.
