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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Yes, but can you see the lion? A deep exposure shows the famous dark indentation that looks like a horse's head, visible just left and below center, and known unsurprisingly as the Horsehead Nebula. The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) is part of a vast complex of dark absorbing dust and bright glowing gas. To bring out details of the Horsehead's pasture, an astrophotographer artistically combined light accumulated for over 20 hours in hydrogen (orange), oxygen (blue), and sulfur (green). The resulting spectacular picture captured from Raachine, Lebanon, details an intricate tapestry of gaseous wisps and dust-laden filaments that were created and sculpted over eons by stellar winds and ancient supernovas. The featured composition brings up another pareidolic animal icon -- that of a lion's head -- in the expansive orange colored gas above the horse's head. The Flame Nebula is visible just to the left of the Horsehead. The Horsehead Nebula lies 1,500 light years distant towards the constellation of Orion.

Photo by Maroun Mahfoud

Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019) - American writer and poet, born in Lorain, Ohio,  She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

All dressed in black,
with much golden bling,
earrings dangling from lobes,
'twas a beautiful thing.

A barren plain of sorrow,
is my life's path unchosen,
as I trudge towards the morrow,
of broken dreams, memories lost.
Life was special but isn't now.
Is she about to embark
on this painful journey?
I sit beside her,
she is alone, in her mind.
Providing comfort to her,
reducing the worry,
is my new task.
I cannot bear the thought
of her mental burden,
being this painful for her.
She doesn't remember,
but I still do.
The sadness is destroying me.

I visit my wife, most every day.
Going in early afternoon
and leaving after helping her to bed.
Last night she was confused. Not
knowing what to do. The first time
I have seen this behavior.
No concept of where to go or
what to do next.
She comments, "I'm alone. I need
to be with you."
I believe I now understand. She is
a young girl, in her mind, with no
memory and is mentally alone.
This must frighten her,
when she sits, a broken shell,
from her life before,
but still clinging to the love
she knew.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This was a very unusual type of solar eclipse. Typically, it is the Earth's Moon that eclipses the Sun. In 2012, though, the planet Venus took a turn. Like a solar eclipse by the Moon, the phase of Venus became a continually thinner crescent as Venus became increasingly better aligned with the Sun. Eventually the alignment became perfect and the phase of Venus dropped to zero. The dark spot of Venus crossed our parent star. The situation could technically be labeled a Venusian annular eclipse with an extraordinarily large ring of fire. Pictured here during the occultation, the Sun was imaged in three colors of ultraviolet light by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, with the dark region toward the right corresponding to a coronal hole. Hours later, as Venus continued in its orbit, a slight crescent phase appeared again. The next Venusian transit across the Sun will occur in 2117.

It ran cold,
it ran hard,
towards the freedom,
it once had.
Being taken away,
while the World watched.
Where does it end?
What do we do,
to protect the lives
of the innocent child?
Cowardice, is a name
you often hear,
as Nations stand by
and do not take action,
to stop the maniacal
conduct of those
committing war crimes.
Stop it now, before it is
too late and other nations
exercise abuse of
Sovereign nation.

How are you today?
he asked from within.
It became very obvious,
she didn't know him.

Sitting and listening,
as my wife introduces
me as her husband,
again, once more,
to those at the Memory
Care Facility, who've heard
this story before.
She isn't aware of the
repetition. I do love it
when she tells them.

I write out the words
of love, in this life,
especially when I'm
thinking about my wife.
She's in a Memory care
home, the rest of her life,
never to return home,
to be with her family

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

From somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, Comet 2I/Borisov was just visiting the Solar System. Discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov on August 30, 2019, the first known interstellar comet is seen in these two Hubble Space Telescope images from November and December 2019. On the left, a distant background galaxy near the line-of-sight to Borisov is blurred as Hubble tracked the speeding comet and dust tail about 327 million kilometers from Earth. At right, 2I/Borisov appears shortly after perihelion, its closest approach to Sun. European Southern Observatory observations indicate that this comet may never have passed close to any star before its 2019 perihelion passage. Borisov's closest approach to our fair planet, a distance of about 290 million kilometers, came on December 28, 2019. Even though Hubble's sharp images don't resolve the comet's nucleus, they did lead to estimates of less than 1 kilometer for its diameter.

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