Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

As you watched October's first Full Moon rise last night, the Full Moon closest to the northern autumnal equinox, you were probably asking yourself, "How long would it take to bike to the Moon?" Sure, Apollo 11 astronauts made the trip in 1969, from launch to Moon landing, in about 103 hours or 4.3 days. But the Moon is 400,000 kilometers away. This year, the top bike riders in planet Earth's well-known Tour de France race covered almost 3,500 kilometers in 21 stages after about 87 hours on the road. That gives an average speed of about 40 kilometers per hour and a lunar cycling travel time of 10,000 hours, a little over 416 days. While this bike rider's destination isn't clear, his journey did begin around moonrise on September 27 near Cleeve Hill, Bishops Cleeve, Cheltenham, UK.

Photo by Susan Snow

A plea from Frank W. Fox, professor of American history, life-long conservative, and patriot, to members of the LDS faith:

Dear Sister or Brother,

My name is Prof. Frank W. Fox. I taught American History at Brigham Young University until my retirement in 2006, and, along with my colleague Clayne Pope, created the university’s American Heritage Program, under the guidance of the First Presidency. Some of you may have been my students. I also wrote a biography of President J. Reuben Clark, also under the direction of the First Presidency.

Both of these experiences grew out of my love for our country and my lifelong devotion to American ideals. For those same reasons, I am writing this letter to share with you my deep concern about the approaching election. Although I am a conservative Republican, I will not be voting for Donald Trump in November. I would like to explain why.

For me, the choice is not between Republican or Democratic policies, nor between Liberal or Conservative principles. It is a choice growing out of the very nature and being of our democracy—which is far more fragile than most Americans realize. Democracy depends on more than party preferences or individual interests, it depends on critical qualities of mind and spirit. Our Founding Fathers knew this profound truth in the marrow of their bones.

I have the gravest misgivings about certain of those qualities of mind and spirit. I would like to set down a few of these for your consideration.

First, there is the matter of truth-telling. No President of the United States can make falsehood a common, daily practice. No free government can stand on a foundation of lies. False-speaking in the public square will destroy the soul of America as surely as it destroyed the souls of Italy and Germany before World War II. The first requirement of any would-be dictator is the ability to lie convincingly, and the first attribute of a people he intends to enslave is their willingness to believe his lies.

Second, Mr. Trump has preached fear and divisiveness among the American people, then used these raw emotions to create a mindless, militant personal following. With this private army, which believes every word he utters, he holds the Republicans of both houses under his thumb—some of them in sheer terror— thus destroying the Constitution’s single most important check and balance. This is precisely how democracies have met their end from ancient times to the present.

Third, in a democracy no one can be above the law, not even the President. Mr. Trump seems to reject this crucial principle. He has violated the laws of the United States in large ways and small ones, often with disastrous results. People have gone to prison for the violations he instigated—one of them cynically pardoned by himself! He was impeached for violating the law and would have been convicted if Senators had been free to vote their consciences.

Fourth, no American patriot can maintain an intimate, secret, and possibly dependent relationship with a foreign adversary. It is absolutely unthinkable. There is overwhelming evidence that our President does in fact have such a relationship with Vladimir Putin, and that this relationship has resulted in the undermining of our most sacred institution, free elections. It is so well documented that it is virtually beyond question.

Finally, no President in our history has been guilty of shirking the Chief Executive’s single most important responsibility—that of protecting the people. President Trump’s handing of the COVID pandemic cannot be seen in any other light than a callous disregard for the safety of the American people in the sole interest of furthering his own political advantage. I have studied his every move in this regard, and I have listened to his every excuse. None of them works.

These things are not “just politics.” They are not incidental and harmless. They are not “fake news.” They are beyond all constitutional limits and outside of all historical precedent. I can scroll through every President from George Washington to Barrack Obama without finding a single instance (including Watergate) of misconduct on this scale.

The death of every democracy begins with a stolen election. The tyrant simply rejects the voice of the people and turns instead to power for its own sake— always claiming that the election was “rigged.” If he cannot win legitimately, he will win by any means available to him, and then just keep right on “winning.” That was what happened to Putin’s Russia.

One final comment. It was recently reported that Vice President Pence, in visiting Arizona, intimated that the General Authorities of the LDS Church were quietly supporting the President. I will bet my eternal salvation against that. The values of patriotism, truthfulness, justice, honor, decency and respect for the law are deeply ingrained in LDS culture. Few church members in full possession of the facts would condone what I have described above.

For these and other reasons, my vote is going to Joe Biden in this election—for his balance, for his wisdom, for his humanity, and more than anything else, for his power to heal. Our country is sorely in need of that.

If any of this touches your heart, please help me to spread this vitally important message. The future of our democracy depends on it.

Sincerely, Frank W. Fox

If you have further interest in exploring these issues, please consult the website SaveOurElection.org

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like its watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars' disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere.

Photo by Damian Peach

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Yes, but have you ever experienced the Eagle Nebula with your ears ? The famous nebula, M16, is best known for the feast it gives your eyes, highlighting bright young stars forming deep inside dark towering structures. These light-years long columns of cold gas and dust are some 6,500 light-years distant toward the constellation of the Serpent (Serpens). Sculpted and eroded by the energetic ultraviolet light and powerful winds from M16's cluster of massive stars, the cosmic pillars themselves are destined for destruction. But the turbulent environment of star formation within M16, whose spectacular details are captured in this combined Hubble (visible) and Chandra (X-ray) image, is likely similar to the environment that formed our own Sun. In the featured video, listen for stars and dust sounding off as the line of sonification moves left to right, with vertical position determining pitch.

My mind is quite strong,
so I've been told.
Sometimes when I write
words come out cold.
Why is that, you may say?
I'm uncertain my mood
and thoughts get in the way.
Some words are quite soft,
while others, harsh and hard.
It matters not their origins,
or if they're dirt in the yard.

Where did you go? I would say,
tell me please, when you go away.
You disappear from here in
this week of gloom,
although you sit with me,
in the same room.
An escape for you from
your own mind.
A place of solitude where
people are kind.
Please talk to me now,
for you know,
I want you near me,
until I must go.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Triple star system GW Orionis appears to demonstrate that planets can form and orbit in multiple planes. In contrast, all the planets and moons in our Solar System orbit in nearly the same plane. The picturesque system has three prominent stars, a warped disk, and inner tilted rings of gas and grit. The featured animation characterizes the GW Ori system from observations with the European Southern Observatory's VLT and ALMA telescopes in Chile. The first part of the illustrative video shows a grand vista of the entire system from a distant orbit, while the second sequence takes you inside the tilted rings to resolve the three central co-orbiting stars. Computer simulations indicate that multiple stars in systems like GW Ori could warp and break-up disks into unaligned, exoplanet-forming rings.

When it comes to health care, President Donald Trump has promised far more than he has delivered. But that doesn’t mean his administration has had no impact on health issues — including the operation of the Affordable Care Act, prescription drug prices and women’s access to reproductive health services............ Continue Reading

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What lies at the edge of an expanding supernova? Subtle and delicate in appearance, these ribbons of shocked interstellar gas are part of a blast wave at the expanding edge of a violent stellar explosion that would have been easily visible to humans during the late stone age, about 20,000 years ago. The featured image was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope and is a closeup of the outer edge of a supernova remnant known as the Cygnus Loop or Veil Nebula. The filamentary shock front is moving toward the top of the frame at about 170 kilometers per second, while glowing in light emitted by atoms of excited hydrogen gas. The distances to stars thought to be interacting with the Cygnus Loop have recently been found by the Gaia mission to be about 2400 light years distant. The whole Cygnus Loop spans six full Moons across the sky, corresponding to about 130 light years, and parts can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd. Oddly, details about how lightning is produced remains a topic of research. What is known is that updrafts carry light ice crystals into collisions with larger and softer ice balls, causing the smaller crystals to become positively charged. After enough charge becomes separated, the rapid electrical discharge that is lightning occurs. Lightning usually takes a jagged course, rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of the Sun. The resulting shock wave starts supersonically and decays into the loud sound known as thunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average 44 lightning bolts occur on the Earth every second. Pictured, over 60 images were stacked to capture the flow of lightning-producing storm clouds in July over Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA. Follow APOD in English on: Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter

Photo by Joe Randall

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Observe the Moon each night and its visible sunlit portion will gradually change. In phases progressing from New Moon to Full Moon to New Moon again, a lunar cycle or synodic month is completed in about 29.5 days. They look full, but top left to bottom right these panels do show the range of lunar phases for a complete synodic month during August 2019 from Ragusa, Sicily, Italy, planet Earth. For this lunar cycle project the panels organize images of the lunar phases in pairs. Each individual image is paired with another image separated by about 15 days, or approximately half a synodic month. As a result the opposite sunlit portions complete the lunar disk and the shadow line at the boundary of lunar night and day, the terminator, steadily marches across the Moon's familiar nearside. For extra credit, what lunar phase would you pair with the Moon tonight?

Photo by Marcella Giulia Pace

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (also known as M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can't appreciate the galaxy's impressive extent in planet Earth's sky. This entertaining composite image compares the angular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (below and right).

Photo by Adam Block