Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How many moons does Saturn have? So far 82 have been confirmed, the smallest being only a fraction of a kilometer across. Six of its largest satellites can be seen here in a composite image with 13 short exposure of the bright planet, and 13 long exposures of the brightest of its faint moons, taken over two weeks last month. Larger than Earth's Moon and even slightly larger than Mercury,Saturn's largest moon Titan has a diameter of 5,150 kilometers and was captured making nearly a complete orbit around its ringed parent planet. Saturn's first known natural satellite, Titan was discovered in 1655 by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, in contrast with several newly discovered moons announced in 2019. The trail on the far right belongs to Iapetus, Saturn's third largest moon. The radius of painted Iapetus' orbit is so large that only a portion of it was captured here. Saturn leads Jupiter across the night sky this month, rising soon after sunset toward the southeast, and remaining visible until dawn.

Photo by Mohammad Ranjbaran MR Thanks: Amir Ehteshami

"Remembrance of things past is not necessarily, the remembrance of things as they were" .. …......"Consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind"...... Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Do you see the horse's head? What you are seeing is not the famous Horsehead nebula toward Orion but rather a fainter nebula that only takes on a familiar form with deeper imaging. The main part of the here imaged molecular cloud complex is a reflection nebula cataloged as IC 4592. Reflection nebulas are actually made up of very fine dust that normally appears dark but can look quite blue when reflecting the visible light of energetic nearby stars. In this case, the source of much of the reflected light is a star at the eye of the horse. That star is part of Nu Scorpii, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). A second reflection nebula dubbed IC 4601 is visible surrounding two stars to the right of the image center. Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator

Photo by Adam BlockSteward Observatory, University of Arizona

I am so dead!
Dead tired, instead
of the drain on my sanity.
Is it about thee?
Or is it still about me?
I tire of the change in this life.
I tire of the illness which took my wife.
Complaining about something you can't control,
is awkward, clumsy, self pity hyperbole.
"I am sorry" I say in advance.
Dead tired in this life's deadliest dance.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Wouldn't it be fun if clouds were castles? Wouldn't it be fun if the laundry on the bedroom chair was a superhero? Wouldn't it be fun if rock mesas on Mars were interplanetary monuments to the human face? Clouds, though, are floating droplets of water and ice. Laundry is cotton, wool, or plastic, woven into garments. Famous Martian rock mesas known by names like the Face on Mars appear quite natural when seen more clearly on better images. Is reality boring? Nobody knows why some clouds make rain. Nobody knows if life ever developed on Mars. Nobody knows why the laundry on the bedroom chair smells like root beer. Scientific exploration can not only resolve mysteries, but uncover new knowledge, greater mysteries, and yet deeper questions. As humanity explores our universe, perhaps fun -- through discovery -- is just beginning.

> Recognise the creativity behind crime, then you can thwart it || by David Cropley : Psyche

> The Deep Roots of the Vegetable That ‘Took Over the World’ || by Gemma Tarlach : Atlas Obscura

> The mice that roared: how eight tiny countries took on foreign fishing fleets || by Christopher Pala : The Guardian

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

You can't walk along the Milky Way. Still, under a dark sky you can explore it. To the eye the pale luminous trail of light arcing through the sky on a dark, moonless night does appear to be a path through the heavens. The glowing celestial band is the faint, collective light of distant stars cut by swaths of obscuring interstellar dust clouds. It lies along the plane of our home galaxy, so named because it looks like a milky way. Since Galileo's time, the Milky Way has been revealed to telescopic skygazers to be filled with congeries of innumerable stars and cosmic wonders.

Photo by Rolf Weisenfeld

Walk not quickly, if your balance is gone,
for it takes no effort and your on the ground.
Choose your path; smooth and straight,
to avoid falling. If you must, use a cane,
no matter the path, no matter the stone,
do what you must, to stand alone.

Mental floss, a string of words,
running through my head.
No matter, the word choice,
it will run through this porous,
brain as if salt were present.
I cannot control the blandness
of the words written,
and I watch them swirl
into the old mind of an uncontrollable
muse. Sorry to say but the mind is mine.

www.facebook.com/devid.penguti

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Awash in a sea of incandescent plasma and anchored in strong magnetic fields, sunspots are planet-sized dark islands in the solar photosphere, the bright surface of the Sun. Found in solar active regions, sunspots look dark only because they are slightly cooler though, with temperatures of about 4,000 kelvins compared to 6,000 kelvins for the surrounding solar surface. These sunspots lie in active region AR2835. The largest active region now crossing the Sun, AR2835 is captured in this sharp telescopic close-up from July 1 in a field of view that spans about 150,000 kilometers or over ten Earth diameters. With powerful magnetic fields, solar active regions are often responsible for solar flares and coronal mass ejections, storms which affect space weather near planet Earth.

Photo by Michael Teoh