Magazine Posts

Run where others fear to walk.
Make your life action, not just talk.
Speak for all who are in need.
Every day is yours to do a good deed.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

On sol 46 (April 6, 2021) the Perseverance rover held out a robotic arm to take its first selfie on Mars. The WATSON camera at the end of the arm was designed to take close-ups of martian rocks and surface details though, and not a quick snap shot of friends and smiling faces. In the end, teamwork and weeks of planning on Mars time was required to program a complex series of exposures and camera motions to include Perseverance and its surroundings. The resulting 62 frames were composed into a detailed mosiac, one of the most complicated Mars rover selfies ever taken. In this version of the selfie, the rover's Mastcam-Z and SuperCam instruments are looking toward WATSON and the end of the rover's outstretched arm. About 4 meters (13 feet) from Perseverance is a robotic companion, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter.

My words are rusty,
I cannot lie,
No matter how hard,
I must not try.

The water was tepid
with a brackish taste,
as though it contained,
undesirable chemical waste.

Will you come to me on the morrow,
bringing forth your joy and sorrow,
as you carry, your memories past?
Is this the ending of the story thou hast?
I will be gone in the future soon,
as a new tune I hear,
spills forth, the sadness I fear.
Stay with me until dawn does awake.
One more hug; I will not break.

Oh my, the joy I feel,
when you are talking to me,
about what is happening now,
in the present or recent day..
You don't recall words just said.
The thoughts aren't there.
Instead you ask questions of me.
"Do you remember?" Is what you
say, "the lady we saw yesterday?"
There is confusion, by me,
if it was on TV or in real time.
What a struggle it must be for you,
not able to recall or to separate
TV actions from the real world.
I see confusion in you, when
an ad comes on and you say,
"Who are these people? For them,
I do not know?" I tell you they
are actors, or it is an ad.
I am saddened to see
there is no reaction or understanding
of what I just said and will probably
hear the words, from you, again.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How did the first stars form? To help find out, the SPHINX computer simulation of star formation in the very early universe was created, some results of which are shown in the featured video. Time since the Big Bang is shown in millions of years on the upper left. Even 100 million years after the Big Bang, matter was spread too uniformly across the cosmos for stars to be born. Besides background radiation, the universe was dark. Soon, slight matter clumps rich in hydrogen gas begin to coalesce into the first stars. In the time-lapse video, purple denotes gas, white denotes light, and gold shows radiation so energetic that it ionizes hydrogen, breaking it up into charged electrons and protons. The gold-colored regions also track the most massive stars that die with powerful supernovas. The inset circle highlights a central region that is becoming a galaxy. The simulation continues until the universe was about 550 million years old. To assess the accuracy of the SPHINX simulations and the assumptions that went into them, the results are not only being compared to current deep observations, but will also be compared with more direct observations of the early universe planned with NASA's pending James Webb Space Telescope.

He rode through the Valley of Death.
Etched in his mind, were the fears,
he had worried about, over the years.
From the depth of his Soul,
amidst a ruinous life,
was the rapid derogation of
his beloved wife.
Questions were raised; answers were few,
no help by Medical staff except
to keep steering the course,
while friends and family were his only resource.
Take from me now, for I am able to pay.
You will I know, 'til the end of our day.

To write again, these words to you,
brings satisfaction, in what I do,
for these words, which are here,
will remain on paper, when I disappear.
Written words as a Writer's craft,
brings forth meaning, from the chaff.
Are the words confusing? I will ask,
for writing words is my daily task.

It was early,
it was morning,
the Sun yet to rise.
A sound heard,
a tapping noise.
A staccato of taps.
Startled, now awake,
the taps came once more,
rattling the window.
Darn Flicker,
your beak and head,
using as a hammer.
Making all the noise.
I'm now awake,
the noise was intense,
so getting up,
is what I did.

See more of Randall Munroe's work at xkcd.com - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License,

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula. Also known as M42, the nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars are born partly because it is the nearest large star-forming region, but also because the nebula's energetic stars have blown away obscuring gas and dust clouds that would otherwise block our view - providing an intimate look at a range of ongoing stages of starbirth and evolution. The featured image of the Orion Nebula is among the sharpest ever, constructed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The entire Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.