Magazine Posts

Here I go again,
down this old path.
Should I be serious
Or just have a laugh?

Words that begin flowing
towards paper, with pen in hand.
Are words left unspoken,
just heard in my head.
I write these thoughts, unthinking.
Free of the fear of failing,
when I send these words to thee.
Where am I now? What's next to do,
but to shelter and protect, my only you.
Where ever I go, what ever happens,
when I am around you,
it is so good for me,
I hope it is for you too.
For you are the one I love, every day.
I hope that this feeling never goes away.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way's diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars. That's about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way. Part of a current investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of astronomer Vera Rubin's pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies. Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate the dominating presence of dark matter in our universe.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

On January 21, 2019 moonwatchers on planet Earth saw a total lunar eclipse. In 35 frames this composite image follows the Moon that night as it crossed into Earth's dark umbral shadow. Taken 3 minutes apart, they almost melt together in a continuous screen that captures the dark colors within the shadow itself and the northern curve of the shadow's edge. Sunlight scattered by the atmosphere into the shadow causes the lunar surface to appear reddened during totality (left), but close to the umbra's edge, the limb of the eclipsed Moon shows a remarkable blue hue. The blue eclipsed moonlight originates as rays of sunlight pass through layers high in Earth's upper stratosphere, colored by ozone that scatters red light and transmits blue. The Moon's next crossing into Earth's umbral shadow, will be on May 26, 2021.

Photo by Laszlo Francsics

https://benjhicks.com/

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Some 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo, the globular star cluster NGC 6752 roams the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752 follows clusters Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae as the third brightest globular in planet Earth's night sky. It holds over 100 thousand stars in a sphere about 100 light-years in diameter. Telescopic explorations of the NGC 6752 have found that a remarkable fraction of the stars near the cluster's core, are multiple star systems. They also reveal the presence of blue straggle stars, stars which appear to be too young and massive to exist in a cluster whose stars are all expected to be at least twice as old as the Sun. The blue stragglers are thought to be formed by star mergers and collisions in the dense stellar environment at the cluster's core. This sharp color composite also features the cluster's ancient red giant stars in yellowish hues. (Note: The bright, spiky blue star at 11 o'clock from the cluster center is a foreground star along the line-of-sight to NGC 6752)

Photo by Jose Joaquin Perez

Rough are the words
I write for thee.
Covering many subjects
for you and me.
Where do these words
come into line?
From out of the depth
where words are entwined,
from the tip of my toes
to the depth of my Soul,
entertaining you and others,
has always been my goal.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

It is the closest cluster of stars to the Sun. The Hyades open cluster is bright enough to have been remarked on even thousands of years ago, yet is not as bright or compact as the nearby Pleiades (M45) star cluster. Pictured here is a particularly deep image of the Hyades which has brings out vivid star colors and faint coincidental nebulas. The brightest star in the field is yellow Aldebaran, the eye of the bull toward the constellation of Taurus. Aldebaran, at 65 light-years away, is now known to be unrelated to the Hyades cluster, which lies about 150 light-years away. The central Hyades stars are spread out over about 15 light-years. Formed about 625 million years ago, the Hyades likely shares a common origin with the Beehive cluster (M44), a naked-eye open star cluster toward the constellation of Cancer, based on M44's motion through space and remarkably similar age.

Photo by Jose Mtanous

Sometimes I sleep "The Sleep of the Dead"
with no thoughts or dreams in my head.
An absence of words, so deep inside
stay within my head; are trying to hide.
When I awake from this stupor so deep,
I then know what it is like to sleep.
Unlike the times I get up at three
as the words in my head will remind me,
scribe down to paper, in my notebook,
the words that appear haven't been forsook.
Later that morning, I'll re-read the words,
striking out those are simply absurd.

Laying in bed, words all a jumble;
I'm not writing them down,
for I will not tumble,
into this pit of worry
or feeling sorry for me.
Oh dear God, help me out of this mess
of seeing my beloved, slipping away.
What can I do, on this miserable day?
My love for her is still there;
She knows me not, I'll not despair,
for I know her and always will.
My love for her gives me a thrill.
I know these words, corny they are,
but they're my words, they surely are.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What does the solar wind sound like? A wind of fast moving particles blows out from our Sun, and although space transmits sound poorly, particle impact and variable-field data from NASA's near-Sun Parker Solar Probe is being translated into sound. The disarming audio track of the featured video recounts several of these reverberations, including spooky-sounding Langmuir Waves (heard first), hurricane-sounding Whistler Mode Waves (heard next), and hard-to-describe Dispersive Chirping Waves (heard last). Also impressive is the video's time-lapse visual track which shows Parker's view to the side of its sun shield, and where the planets Earth, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus appear in succession, interspersed with bursts of powerful cosmic rays impacting the imager. The nature of the solar wind near Mercury is surprisingly different from near the Earth, and much study is underway to better understand the differences. Discovery + Outreach: Graduate student research position open for APOD