Magazine Posts

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:

What's happening to galaxy NGC 474? The multiple layers of emission appear strangely complex given the relatively featureless appearance of the elliptical galaxy in less deep images. The cause of the shells is a topic of research, but they are possibly tidal tails related to debris left over from absorbing numerous small galaxies in the past billion years. Alternatively, the shells may be like ripples in a pond, where the ongoing collision with the spiral galaxy just to the right of NGC 474 is causing density waves to ripple through the galactic giant. Regardless of the actual cause, the featured image dramatically highlights the increasing evidence that the halos of some elliptical galaxies are surprisingly complicated. Similarly, the halo of our own Milky Way Galaxy is one example of such unexpected intricacies. NGC 474 spans about 250,000 light years and lies about 100 million light years distant toward the constellation of the Fish (Pisces).

Eastern Facade of Spøttrup Castle, Denmark.

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Direct your gaze through this gap with binoculars or a small telescope and you are looking through a window over 300 light-years wide at stars some 10,000 light-years or more from Earth. Sometimes called the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, M24's luminous stars stretch across this gorgeous interstellar scene. Spanning over four full moons on the sky toward the constellation Sagittarius, the telescopic field of view includes dark markings B92 and B93 near the center of M24, along with other clouds of dust and glowing nebulae toward the center of the Milky Way.

Photo by Chuck Ayoub

Scarlet flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus) in Mato Grosso, Brazil.

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

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The Mare Orientale, Latin for Eastern Sea, is one of the most striking large scale lunar features. The youngest of the large lunar impact basins it's very difficult to see from an earthbound perspective. Still, captured on July 7 during a period of favorable tilt, or libration of the lunar nearside, the Eastern Sea can be found at the upper right in this sharp telescopic view. In the image, the large lunar mare is extremely foreshortened and stretches along the Moon's western edge. Formed by the impact of an asteroid over 3 billion years ago and nearly 1000 kilometers across, the impact basin's concentric circular features are ripples in the lunar crust. But they are a little easier to spot in more direct images of the region taken from lunar orbit. So why is the Eastern Sea at the Moon's western edge? The Mare Orientale lunar feature was named before 1961. That's when the convention labeling east and west on lunar maps was reversed.

Photo by The Mare Orientale

Cacomantis sonneratii (Banded Bay Cuckoo) in Ajodhya Hills, West Bengal, India.

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

Brian Tracy - Canadian-American motivational public speaker and self-development author. www.briantracy.com