Public Posts

Narrow-banded dartwhite (Catasticta flisa postaurea) on Mimosa pudica, Villa Gerar, Silvania, Cundinamarca, Colombia.

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

Carl Edward Sagan (1934 – 1996) ~ American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. He was one of the most well-known scientist of the 1970's and 1980's . He was controversial in scientific, political, and religious circles for his views on extraterrestrial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and religion. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. He was an advocate for nuclear disarmament and co-wrote and hosted 'Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.'  He was widely regarded as a freethinker and one of his most famous quotations, in Cosmos, was, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  He died at the age of 62 from complications of Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS). More
 
Quote source: From the book "Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan (1995) 

My Heart Has Known Its Winter

A little while spring will claim its own,
In all the land around for mile on mile
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone.
My still heart will sing a little while.

And men will never think this wilderness
Was barren once when grass is over all,
Hearing laughter they may never guess
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

This poem is in the public domain

Arna Bontemps (1902-1973)  Poet, writer, teacher, novelist. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, the son of Creole parents. Bontemps published his first poem, "Hope" In 1924, which was followed by other poems, children's books and fiction writings; including "God Sends Sunday" (1931) and "You Can't Pet a Possum" (1934). He  published his novel "Black Thunder" in 1936  which is considered by some as his best work. Followed by the children's book "Sad-Faced Boy" (1937), and his novel, "Drums at Dusk" (1939). This book was more widely recognized than his other novels.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

If you could stand on Titan -- what would you see? The featured color view from Titan gazes across an unfamiliar and distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon. The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens probe in 2005 after a 2.5-hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of negative 179 degrees C. The large light-toned rock below and left of center is only about 15 centimeters across and lies 85 centimeters away. The saucer-shaped spacecraft is believed to have penetrated about 15 centimeters into a place on Titan's surface that had the consistency of wet sand or clay. Huygen's batteries enabled the probe to take and transmit data for more than 90 minutes after landing. Titan's bizarre chemical environment may bear similarities to planet Earth's before life evolved.

Vineyard worker at Guadalupe Valley, Baja California, Mexico, where 95% of Mexican wines are produced.

Tomas Castelazo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

"All the stream that's roaring by
Came out of a needle's eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle's eye still goad it on".

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This is not a screen from a video game. Nestled below the tree-line, the small mountain church does look like it might be hiding from Moon though. In the well-composed telephoto snapshot, taken on November 23, the church walls are partly reflecting light from terrestrial flood lights. Of course, the Moon is reflecting light from the Sun. At any given time the Sun illuminates fully half of the Moon's surface, also known as the lunar dayside, but on that night only a sliver of its sunlit surface was visible. About three days after New Moon, the Moon was in a waxing crescent phase. The single exposure was captured shortly after sunset in skies near Danta di Cadore, northern Italy, planet Earth.

Photo by Giorgia Hofer

The Sabha Mandap of the Sun Temple, Modhera, India.

Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across, a cosmic bubble blown by winds from its central, massive star. This deep telescopic image includes narrowband image data, to isolate light from hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms produce the blue-green hue that seems to enshroud the nebula's detailed folds and filaments. Visible within the nebula, NGC 6888's central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun's mass every 10,000 years. In fact, the Crescent Nebula's complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life, this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away.

Photo by Greg Bass