Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's happened to the sky? Aurora! Captured in 2015, this aurora was noted by Icelanders for its great brightness and quick development. The aurora resulted from a solar storm, with high energy particles bursting out from the Sun and through a crack in Earth's protective magnetosphere a few days later. Although a spiral pattern can be discerned, creative humans might imagine the complex glow as an atmospheric apparition of any number of common icons. In the foreground of the featured image is the Ölfusá River while the lights illuminate a bridge in Selfoss City. Just beyond the low clouds is a nearly full Moon. The liveliness of the Sun -- and likely the resulting auroras on Earth -- is slowly increasing as the Sun emerges from a Solar minimum, a historically quiet period in its 11-year cycle.

Photo by Davide Necchi

Wash the paper,
sketch the subject,
faint the line.
Select your brush,
mix paint on the pallet,
keep paper flat
to avoid paint run
of watercolor.
Paint the picture,
wet or dry.
Work your art.
Nice first try.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Still bright in planet Earth's night skies, good telescopic views of Saturn and its beautiful rings often make it a star at star parties. But this stunning view of Saturn's rings and night side just isn't possible from telescopes closer to the Sun than the outer planet. They can only bring Saturn's day into view. In fact, this image of Saturn's slender sunlit crescent with night's shadow cast across its broad and complex ring system was captured by the Cassini spacecraft. A robot spacecraft from planet Earth, Cassini called Saturn orbit home for 13 years before it was directed to dive into the atmosphere of the gas giant on September 15, 2017. This magnificent mosaic is composed of frames recorded by Cassini's wide-angle camera only two days before its grand final plunge. Saturn's night will not be seen again until another spaceship from Earth calls.

Moonlight and roses,
champagne or wine,
chocolate tid bits,
all sound devine,
when courting another,
sweetheart of thine.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Faint comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) sweeps past background stars in the constellation Taurus and even fainter distant galaxies in this telescopic frame from September 7. About 5 years ago, this comet's 4 kilometer spanning, double-lobed nucleus became the final resting place of robots from planet Earth, following the completion of the historic Rosetta mission to the comet. After wandering out beyond the orbit of Jupiter, Churyumov-Gerasimenko is now returning along its 6.4 year periodic orbit toward its next perihelion or closest approach to the Sun, on November 2. On November 12, the comet's perigee, its closest approach to Earth, will bring it within about 0.42 astronomical units. Telescopes should still be required to view it even at its brightest, predicted to be in late November and December. On September 7 Rosetta's comet was about 0.65 astronomical units away or about 5.4 light-minutes from our fair planet.

Photo by CARA Project

He strolls along
the Market Place,
his walk, like a strut,
at his own pace.
Where goest you now?
You've fallen from grace.

Where is the noise?
Where is the fury,
when we hear the wind
in a big hurry?
No thunder; no lightning,
as you continually said.
Why? Did you guess wrong
once more?

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region adopts the colorful Hubble palette and includes cosmic sculptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex. Described as elephant trunks or Pillars of Creation, dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars. Energetic radiation from the cluster stars erodes material near the tips, eventually exposing the embedded new stars. Extending from the ridge of bright emission left of center is another dusty starforming column known as the Fairy of Eagle Nebula. M16 lies about 7,000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).

Photo by Martin Pugh

He walked or swayed,
like the oldest tree.
His limbs were thick,
rough and scarred,
beneath his own Canopy.

A wall of time.
A pane of glass.
Where is love
in our life's morass?

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What surrounds the Andromeda galaxy? Out in space, Andromeda (M31) is closely surrounded by several small satellite galaxies, and further out it is part of the Local Group of Galaxies -- of which our Milky Way galaxy is also a member. On the sky, however, gas clouds local to our Milky Way appear to surround M31 -- not unlike how water clouds in Earth's atmosphere may appear to encompass our Moon. The gas clouds toward Andromeda, however, are usually too faint to see. Enter the featured 45-degree long image -- one of the deeper images yet taken of the broader Andromeda region. This image, sensitive to light specifically emitted by hydrogen gas, shows these faint and unfamiliar clouds in tremendous detail. But the image captures more. At the image top is the Triangulum galaxy (M33), the third largest galaxy in the Local Group and the furthest object that can be seen with the unaided eye. Below M33 is the bright Milky-Way star Mirach. The image is the digital accumulation of several long exposures taken from 2018 to 2021 from Pulsnitz, Germany.

Harvesting hay,
providing the feed
to horses and cows,
it's what they need,
to provide dairy
or win a great race.
For tilling the land,
to raise crops
for the hungry,
as we harvest in full,
providing abundance,
for one and for all.