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Photo by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Can you find which day is the winter solstice? Each panel shows one day. With 360 movie panels, the sky over (almost) an entire year is shown in time lapse format as recorded by a video camera on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, California. The camera recorded an image every 10 seconds from before sunrise to after sunset and from mid-2009 to mid-2010. A time stamp showing the local time of day is provided on the lower right. The videos are arranged chronologically, with July 28 shown on the upper left, and January 1 located about half way down. In the videos, darkness indicates night, blue depicts clear day, while gray portrays pervasive daytime cloud cover. Many videos show complex patterns of clouds moving across the camera's wide field as that day progresses. The initial darkness in the middle depicts the delayed dawn and fewer daylight hours of winter. Although every day lasts 24 hours, nighttime lasts longest in the northern hemisphere in December and the surrounding winter months. Therefore, finding the panel with the longest night will locate the day of winter solstice -- which happens to be today in the northern hemisphere. As the videos collectively end, sunset and then darkness descend first on the winter days just above the middle, and last on the mid-summer near the bottom. Free Download: 2020 APOD Calendar

Video by Ken MurphyMurphLab Music: Moby

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The 2019 December Solstice, on the first day of winter in planet Earth's northern hemisphere and summer in the south, is at 4:19 Universal Time December 22. That's December 21 for North America, though. Celebrate with a timelapse animation of the Sun's seasonal progression through the sky. It was made with solargraph images from an ingenious array of 27 pinhole cameras. The first frame from the Solarcan camera matrix was recorded near December 21, 2018. The last frame in the series finished near June 21, 2019, the northern summer solstice. All 27 camera exposures were started at the same time, with a camera covered and removed from the array once a week. Viewed consecutively the pinhole camera pictures accumulate the traces of the Sun's daily path from winter (bottom) to summer (top) solstice. Traces of the Sun's path are reflected by the foreground Williestruther Loch, in the Scottish Borders. Just select the image or follow this link to play the entire 27 frame (gif) timelapse.

Photo by Sam Cornwell

The sounds I hear within my head,
are filled with loss; filled with dread.
An old friend of so many years,
has escaped this life, with no more fears.
Away he went, on a golden cart,
toward the heavens where life did start.
God speed to you, my dear friend.
You will join your brother now.
Amen

Lovely flower,
a bloom from afar.
I know not
what you are.

Poets are but a dime a dozen
Found throughout our native land,
Writing words for those who listen
To the sounds of shifting sand.

Windblown hair covers the eyes
of a young girl,
balanced precariously, upon tubes
of metal, rolling without sound
on rubber doughnuts.

Sunlight's brightness extends a
shadowed twin that keeps pace
with the rider.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Shadows grow long near sunset in this wide panoramic view from the Curiosity rover on Mars. Made with Curiosity's navcam, the scene covers about 200 degrees from north through east to south (left to right), stitched together from frames taken by the Mars rover on sol 2616. That's just Earth date December 16. Curiosity is perched on top of a plateau on Western Butte. The distant northern rim of Gale crater is visible along the left. Near center is Central Butte, already visited by Curiosity. On the right, the shadow of the rover seems to stretch toward the base of Aeolis Mons (Mount Sharp), a future destination. The monochrome navcam frames have been colorized to approximate the colors of the late martian afternoon.

Photo by Frank McKenna on Unsplash

I see blue,
but I am not.
I am happy,
can't you see,
all the joy
coming over me?

I love your clothes.
I love your style.
When I see you
I always smile