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Looking through these three windows on history reminds us that while the tools of civilization evolve, the human story continues to be driven by many of the same hopes, challenges, and ambitions that have shaped every generation. Continue reading

Steve Smith on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the evening star emerged beyond the bright lunar limb.

Photo by Debra Ceravolo

Flower of a Geranium sanguineum, bloody crane's-bill. Focus stack of 51 photos.

Agnes Monkelbaan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

By Arjan Stalpers on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground horizon rising from left to right, and clouds above the horizon. Differences include that the photograph was taken in mid-April earlier this year in Cascavel, Brazil, while the painting was composed in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889. The original Starry Night is considered by many to be one of the three most famous paintings in the world today and a statement about the wonders of the night sky. Today is (roughly) the anniversary of the morning that van Gogh saw the sky that he later painted in his version of Starry Night. Night Sky Jigsaw: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photo by Rodrigo Guerra, Original Painting: Vincent van Gogh

Alley on Escheckstraße (and part of the cuckoo clock trail), Schönwald im Schwarzwald, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

By Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Do you see that blue blob to the lower right of the image center? Astronomers think that it shows where a massive star exploded as a supernova whose light reached Earth 1,700 years ago. The image combines optical data from the PanSTARRS telescopes in Hawaii (background stars in red, green, and blue), radio from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa (large red cloud) and X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton (shown in blue). The large cloud is a star forming region called Sagittarius C, which is approximately 50 light-years in extent and about 26,000 light-years from Earth. It is located only about 260 light-years from the supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy (off to the left of the image). If the blue blob is confirmed to be a supernova remnant, it would be one of the closest ever discovered to the Galactic Center. In this dense region, the deaths of massive stars are connected to the birth of new stars through gas and magnetic fields in a complex way.

Photo by X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCLA/Z. Zhu et al.; ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical: PanSTARRS; Radio: MeerKAT; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and P. Edmonds Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

Red-headed weaver (Anaplectes rubriceps leuconotus) male building nest in the Soysambu Conservancy, Kenya.

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.