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Every evening, the skies above the village of Petulu in central Bali fill with Little Egrets, Cattle Egrets, and Javan Pond Herons as they arrive to roost overnight. Their numbers have been estimated to total 20,000. The Balinese believe that the birds are the spirits of the survivors of a massacre in 1965. That year, the villagers in Petulu took action to rid the village of negative energy by holding a ceremonial cleansing ceremony; a week later, the herons called “Kokokan” arrived for the first time ever and have rested there ever since.  @lindzmarsh Lindz Marsh on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

In 2011, on January 20, NASA's NanoSail-D2 unfurled a very thin and very reflective 10 square meter sail becoming the first solar sail spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Often considered the stuff of science fiction, sailing through space was suggested 400 years ago by astronomer Johannes Kepler, who had observed comet tails blown by the solar wind. But modern solar sail spacecraft designs, like NanoSail-D2, Japan's interplanetary spacecraft IKAROS, or the Planetary Society's Lightsail A, rely on the small but continuous pressure from sunlight itself for thrust. Glinting in the sunlight as it circled planet Earth, NanoSail-D2's solar sail was periodically bright and visible to the eye. These remarkably detailed images were captured by manually tracking the orbiting solar sail spacecraft with a small telescope.

Photo by Ralf Vandebergh

Blue whale skeleton at the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum, London, England. 'Hope', nickname of the blue whale skeleton, is 25.2 metres (83 ft) long and is suspended from the ceiling since July 14th 2017. Blue whales are the largest creature ever to have lived in the Earth. In the 1800s there was an estimated amount of 250,000 blue whales across the world's oceans. After decades of commercial hunting the species was to the brink of extinction, with only around 400 surviving in 1966. That year the world took action in London and decided to legally protect blue whales from commercial hunting. Since then the population of blue whales has steadily grown to its current level of around 20,000.

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

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Mahatma Gandhi - (October 2, 1869 - January 30, 1948)

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