Magazine Posts

Forever, a word about
encompassing time.
Long may it be or short
from design.
There is no life line
if there is not time
to live a life of happiness
and it is sublime.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Lighter than typically dark, smooth, mare the Mare Frigoris lies in the far lunar north. Also known as the Sea of Cold, it stretches across the familiar lunar nearside in this close up of the waxing gibbous Moon's north polar region. Dark-floored, 95 kilometer wide crater Plato is just left of the center. Sunlit peaks of the lunar Alps (Montes Alpes) are highlighted below and right of Plato, between the more southern Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) and Mare Frigoris. The prominent straight feature cutting through the mountains is the lunar Alpine Valley (Vallis Alpes). Joining the Mare Imbrium and Mare Frigoris, the lunar valley is about 160 kilometers long and up to 10 kilometers wide.

Photo by Matt Smith

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A very faint but very large squid-like nebula is visible in planet Earth's sky -- but inside a still larger bat. The Giant Squid Nebula cataloged as Ou4, and Sh2-129 also known as the Flying Bat Nebula, are both caught in this cosmic scene toward the royal royal constellation Cepheus. Composed with 55 hours of narrowband image data, the telescopic field of view is 3 degrees or 6 Full Moons across. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula's alluring bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently completely surrounded by the reddish hydrogen emission region Sh2-129, the true distance and nature of the Squid Nebula have been difficult to determine. Still, a more recent investigation suggests Ou4 really does lie within Sh2-129 some 2,300 light-years away. Consistent with that scenario, Ou4 would represent a spectacular outflow driven by HR8119, a triple system of hot, massive stars seen near the center of the nebula. The truly giant Squid Nebula would physically be nearly 50 light-years across. New: APOD Mirror in Turkish from Rasyonalist

Photo by Yannick Akar

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Look to the east just after sunset tonight and you'll see a most impressive Mars. Tonight, Mars will appear its biggest and brightest of the year, as Earth passes closer to the red planet than it has in over two years -- and will be again for another two years. In a week, Mars will be almost as bright -- but at opposition, meaning that it will be directly opposite the Sun. Due to the slightly oval shape of the orbits of Mars and Earth, closest approach and opposition occur on slightly different days. The featured image sequence shows how the angular size of Mars has grown during its approach over the past few months. Noticeably orange, Mars is now visible nearly all night long, reflecting more sunlight toward Earth than either Saturn or Jupiter. Even at its closest and largest, though, Mars will still appear about 100 times smaller, in diameter, than a full moon.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's happening at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 5643? A swirling disk of stars and gas, NGC 5643's appearance is dominated by blue spiral arms and brown dust, as shown in the featured image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The core of this active galaxy glows brightly in radio waves and X-rays where twin jets have been found. An unusual central glow makes NGC 5643 one of the closest examples of the Seyfert class of galaxies, where vast amounts of glowing gas are thought to be falling into a central massive black hole. NGC 5643, is a relatively close 55 million light years away, spans about 100 thousand light years across, and can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Wolf (Lupus).

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves - fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The image shows the nebula in three colors specifically emitted by hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur gas. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

Photo by César Blanco González

Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of Hands) Located in the Valley of the Pinturas River, province of Santa Cruz, Argentina, The art in the cave dates from 13,000 to 9,000 years ago. Bone-made pipes were used for spraying the paint on the wall of the cave to create silhouettes of hands. Read more  --   See more images and learn more 

Finding yourself in a mismatched career can be a distressing situation, but even more worrisome is not even being aware your career is wrong for you. Perhaps you’ve been suspecting it for some time or maybe not at all. Regardless, there are a few signs to watch out for that are indicative of the fact that your career is wrong for you.

Above all else, when determining whether or not a career is right for you, it is important to understand that a period of introspection will be required. The downsides of ending up in the wrong career can lead to an unhealthier lifestyle, so it is important to be honest with yourself if you suspect you aren’t in the correct career. 

Do You Get Bored Easily at Work?

There’s nothing wrong with being bored at work. In fact, Udemy published a study that found up to 43 percent of American office workers are bored at their job. It’s unrealistic to assume that every second of your job will capture your undivided attention. With that said, if every second of the day seems boring to you, then there may be an undiscussed problem. 

When it comes to some of the top reasons for leaving a job, a lack of a challenge is high up on the list. As counterintuitive as it may seem, people enjoy work that makes them think. The brain is a muscle and it needs to be trained like the rest of the muscles in your body. Having a mindless job can quickly lead to burnout and contribute to greater stress in your life.

Boredom at work is only natural, but there should be plenty of aspects of your job that keeps you interested and excited to come to the office each and every day. Don’t settle for a job where your mind can simply go on autopilot—find a path that challenges you.

Are Your Skills Underutilized?

Something that can quickly lead to feelings of a mismatched career is a mismatched skillset. If you studied a certain field and graduated expecting to go into it, it can be disheartening to discover you’ve landed a job that uses almost none of those developed skills.

A good sign that you are in a career that is a good fit for your skills is that you feel challenged to a healthy degree while at work. Otherwise, it’s possible that your job may actually not be stimulating to you. In a study, the Washington Post found that only 27 percent of new graduates land a job related to their major. Now, surely, a fair number of the other 73 percent could potentially have chosen a different path, but it is more likely that they accepted a career which presented itself to them.

Landing a job that does not use your skillset is a quick way to grow tired of the job. Try not to stay in a career that simply doesn’t fascinate you. If your skills are underutilized, it’s worth brushing up on how to write a resignation letter and searching for a new path immediately.

Have You Found Yourself Complaining About Your Job?

One of the easiest ways to discover that your career path isn’t for you is by reflecting on whether or not you are that friend who is always complaining about work to other friends. However, there is an important distinction to be made here. If you complain about your work, try to discover if it is the specific job you have or the actual career path.

If it is the latter that bothers you, then you have your answers for whether or not the career you’re in is right for you. Everybody complains about work but doing so every day without any improvements is a huge sign that your career is not right for you. Should you find yourself in this position, consider making a career switch to a path that may better suit your interests and skills.

When it comes to changing careers, discovering the optimal path can seem daunting. However, make use of resources such as coding bootcamps that offer intensive courses in new fields and can potentially prepare you for a new career.

Conclusion

Regardless of whether or not you currently think your career is a mismatch, it’s important to be completely honest with yourself. Your work will make up a large part of your life and should not be something that you simply settle on. Being passionate and enjoying your work is the greatest path to career success. However, you’ll never be passionate about your work if you are in the wrong career. For that reason, don’t stop searching for work until you find a path that lights a fire in your heart.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How long would it take to drive to the Sun? Brittany age 7, and D.J. age 12, ponder this question over dinner one evening. James also age 7, suggests taking a really fast racing car while Christopher age 4, eagerly agrees. Jerry, a really old guy who is used to estimating driving time on family trips based on distance divided by speed, offers to do the numbers. "Let's see ... the Sun is 93 million miles away. If we drove 93 miles per hour the trip would only take us 1 million hours." How long is 1 million hours? One year is 365 days times 24 hours per day, or 8,760 hours. One hundred years would be 876,000 hours, but that's still a little short of the 1 million hour drive time. So the Sun is really quite far away. Christopher is not impressed, but as he grows older he will be. You've got to be impressed by something that's 93 million miles away and still hurts your eyes when you look at it!