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Hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus) in flight in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Recorded the night of August 12-13, images from four dedicated meteor-monitoring cameras at an astronomical observatory in Czechia were aligned and combined to create this all-night, all-sky view. On that night, the total count came to 1,706 meteors. And since that coincided with the peak activity of the 2026 Perseid Meteor Shower, most are perseids. Their overwhelming numbers make them easy to spot. Quite convincingly, perseid trails all trace back to a single radiant on the sky at the upper right, a region in the annual shower's eponymous constellation Perseus. But meteors belonging to other much less active showers can also revealed by finding their radiants too. For example, seen crossing the perseid trails are meteors from a shower whose radiant lies in Cygnus, known as Kappa Cygnids. The antihelion complex, a general region near Aquarius and opposite the Sun in the sky, is also identifiable as a weak source for meteors.

Photo by Valašské Meziříčí Observatory

SBB Ce 6/8 II 14253 "crocodile" electric locomotive with the Gotthard mountain route experience train 31066 Lavorgo - Erstfeld crosses the lower Wattingen bridge near Wassen, Switzerland.

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

Welcome to Kudos365 Weekly History Challenge. Test your history  knowledge and see how many of the history questions you can answer correctly. A new updated History Challenge is released every Saturday.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What does it feel like to zoom around a spinning supermassive black hole? The featured video is an animation showing a time-lapse of 4 years of observations of the star S301 orbiting Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of our Galaxy. S301 was discovered in 2023 with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory, located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Astronomers recently found that S301 takes approximately 8.7 years to go around the black hole and reaches speeds of 25,000 km/s. It comes closer to the black hole than any other stars detected before, at a distance similar to that from Saturn to the Sun. Because it comes so close to Sagittarius A*, S301 could be used to directly measure how fast the black hole spins and test Einstein's theory of general relativity. According to the theory, a spinning black hole drags the fabric of spacetime around itself, affecting the orbits of close-by objects.

Watch NASA's Astronomy Video of the Day

Acro paraglider shows off infinity tumbling, the most spectacular aerobatics maneuver that exist in paragliding.

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

Georgia O'Keeffe - Was one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. She was known as the "Mother of American modernism". Her career spanned seven decades and her work remained largely independent of major art movements. Much of her work, presents large paintings of flowers, shells, rocks, and New Mexico desert landscapes. Biography

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Like an illustration in a galactic Just So Story, the Elephant's Trunk Nebula winds through the emission region and young star cluster complex IC 1396, in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Also known as vdB 142, this cosmic elephant's trunk is over 20 light-years long. The detailed telescopic view features the bright swept-back ridges and pockets of cool interstellar dust and gas that abound in the region. But the dark, tendril-shaped clouds contain the raw material for star formation and hide protostars within. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively faint IC 1396 complex covers a large region on the sky, spanning over 5 degrees. Top to bottom this proboscidean-like rendition reaches across an almost 1 degree wide field of view, though. That's a little less than the angular size of 2 full moons.

Photo by Eddie Sgarbossa