Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in visible light (bottom panel) actually glows brightly in infrared light (top panel). The featured image shows the infrared glow in false blue, recorded recently by the space-based James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and released yesterday, pictured above an archival image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in visible light. The Sombrero Galaxy, also known as M104, spans about 50,000 light years and lies 28 million light years away. M104 can be seen with a small telescope in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

Sika deer (Cervus nippon) in Halileo's Dacha Nature Reserve, Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine.

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

"Medicare Advantage – the commercial alternative to traditional Medicare that promised to cost less, is drawing down federal health care funds, costing taxpayers an extra 22% per enrollee to the tune of US$83 billion a year." More at The Conversation ➜

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

One of the most identifiable nebulas in the sky, the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, is part of a large, dark, molecular cloud. Also known as Barnard 33, the unusual shape was first discovered on a photographic plate in the late 1800s. The red glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. The darkness of the Horsehead is caused mostly by thick dust, although the lower part of the Horsehead's neck casts a shadow to the left. Streams of gas leaving the nebula are funneled by a strong magnetic field. Bright spots in the Horsehead Nebula's base are young stars just in the process of forming. Light takes about 1,500 years to reach us from the Horsehead Nebula. The featured image was taken from the Chilescope Observatory in the mountains of Chile.

Photo by Alex Lin (Chilescope)

Papaya fruits in a grocery store. Colatina, Espírito Santo, Brazil.

ArionStar, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Joe Cox on Unsplash

Aldous Leonard Huxley ~ (1894 -1963) English writer, novelist, philosopher, poet and pacifist. He authored nearly 50 books, including Brave New World (1932) and his final novel, Island (1962)  When he was 16, he suffered an eye infection that left him nearly blind for almost two years. His sight was so compromised that he learned to read in Braille. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. As a pacifist, he renounced all war and refused to fight in any war a decision which caused him not to be able to become a United States citizen after living in California for 14 years with his wife. More

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What lies at the center of our galaxy? In Jules Verne's science fiction classic, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers encounter many strange and exciting wonders. Astronomers already know of some of the bizarre objects that exist at our Galactic Center, including vast cosmic dust clouds, bright star clusters, swirling rings of gas, and even a supermassive black hole. Much of the Galactic Center is shielded from our view in visible light by the intervening dust and gas, but it can be explored using other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The featured video is actually a digital zoom into the Milky Way's center which starts by utilizing visible light images from the Digitized Sky Survey. As the movie proceeds, the light shown shifts to dust-penetrating infrared and highlights gas clouds that were recently discovered in 2013 to be falling toward the central black hole.