Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What is the oldest thing you can see? At 2.5 million light years distant, the answer for the unaided eye is the Andromeda galaxy, because its photons are 2.5 million years old when they reach you. Most other apparent denizens of the night sky -- stars, clusters, and nebulae -- appear as they were only a few hundred to a few thousand years ago, as they lie well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Given its distance, light from Andromeda is likely also the farthest object that you can see. Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy dominates the center of the featured zoomed image, taken from the Sahara Desert in Morocco last month. The featured image is a combination of three background and one foreground exposure -- all taken with the same camera and from the same location and on the same calendar day -- with the foreground image taken during the evening blue hour. M110, a satellite galaxy of Andromenda is visible just above and to the left of M31's core. As cool as it may be to see this neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way with your own eyes, long duration camera exposures can pick up many faint and breathtaking details. Recent data indicates that our Milky Way Galaxy will collide and combine with the similarly-sized Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.

Photo by Jordi Coy

Why do eyes leak,
when words are said,
"I want to be with my father,"
who has been gone for
over thirty years.
I observed this, behavioral
change of the past several months.

Sing again to me,
about a savage love.
Young hearts, rapidly beat,
when love was lost,
by indifference from
the likes of he.
Do you have a heart,
when you leave, alone
encouraging us to part?

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. Spanning half a light-year, the features seen in the Cat's Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the bright central object may actually be a binary star system. The term planetary nebula, used to describe this general class of objects, is misleading. Although these objects may appear round and planet-like in small telescopes, high resolution images with large telescopes reveal them to be stars surrounded by cocoons of gas blown off in the late stages of stellar evolution. Gazing into this Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing more than detailed structure, they may be seeing the fate of our Sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years.

Photo by Raul Villaverde

"Formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, s The Trial which started on July 10 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school."

"The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion, against Fundamentalists, who said the Word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools". Read more

Photo shared by Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American

Burning the candle
at both ends,
should not be a game
of let's pretend.
Make your best choice.
Don't change your mind,
you can now rejoice.
Happiness you'll find.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Soaring high in skies around planet Earth, bright planet Saturn was a star of June's morning planet parade. But very briefly on June 24 it posed with a bright object in low Earth orbit, the International Space Station. On that date from a school parking lot in Temecula, California the ringed-planet and International Space Station were both caught in this single high-speed video frame. Though Saturn was shining at +0.5 stellar magnitude the space station was an even brighter -3 on the magnitude scale. That difference in brightness is faithfully represented in the video capture frame. In the challenging image, the orbiting ISS was at a range of 602 kilometers. Saturn was about 1.4 billion kilometers from the school parking lot.

Photo by Tom Glenn

".... Johnson’s premiership fell because it seemed to recognise no distinction between what is true and what is politically expedient. Once that distinction ceases to matter, democratic discourse becomes unsustainable and political communication becomes a matter of permanent decoding..." Read more

#saratogapassage

Glowed red
the ridge,
as sun rise
came.
My last
viewing was
somewhat the
same.
Where has
love gone?
Away from
me now,
please tell
me, please
for I know
not how,
to approach
a stranger,
a girl
in my
dreams,
who I
will see,
again or
perhaps
never to
be seen
again.