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Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) young female in Kruger National Park, South Africa.

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

              Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

William Blake - (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Although Blake was largely unrecognized during his life, he is now considered an influential figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, but he is now held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. Read more

Zane Lee on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Most galaxies don't have any rings -- why does this galaxy have three? To begin, a ring that's near NGC 1512's center -- and so hard to see here -- is the nuclear ring which glows brightly with recently formed stars. Next out is a ring of stars and dust appearing both red and blue, called, counter-intuitively, the inner ring. This inner ring connects ends of a diffuse central bar of stars that runs horizontally across the galaxy. Farthest out in this wide field image is a ragged structure that might be considered an outer ring. This outer ring appears spiral-like and is dotted with clusters of bright blue stars. All these ring structures are thought to be affected by NGC 1512's own gravitational asymmetries in a drawn-out process called secular evolution. The featured image was captured last month from a telescope at Deep Sky Chile in Chile.

Photo by Daniel Stern

30th St. Moritz Polo World Cup on Snow.

Clément Bucco-Lechat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Oh what a tangled web a planetary nebula can weave. The Red Spider Planetary Nebula shows the complex structure that can result when a normal star ejects its outer gases and becomes a white dwarf star. Officially tagged NGC 6537, this two-lobed symmetric planetary nebula houses one of the hottest white dwarfs ever observed, probably as part of a binary star system. Internal winds flowing out from the central stars, have been measured in excess of 1,000 kilometers per second. These winds expand the nebula, flow along the nebula's walls, and cause waves of hot gas and dust to collide. Atoms caught in these colliding shocks radiate light shown in the featured false-color infrared picture by the James Webb Space Telescope. The Red Spider Nebula lies toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). Its distance is not well known but has been estimated by some to be about 4,000 light-years.

Southwest view of the Lutheran Fishermen's Church in Born auf dem Darß, Germany.

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