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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Does the Moon ever block out Mars? Yes, the Moon occasionally moves in front of all of the Solar System's planets. Just this past Sunday, as visible from some locations in South America, a waning gibbous Moon eclipsed Mars. The featured image from Córdoba, Argentina captured this occultation well, showing a familiar cratered Moon in the foreground with the bright planet Mars unusually adjacent. Within a few seconds, Mars then disappeared behind the Moon, only to reappear a few minutes later across the Moon. Today the Moon moves close to, but not in front of, Venus. Because alignments will not have changed by much, the next two times the Moon passes through this part of the sky – in early September and early October – it will also occult Mars, as seen from parts of South America. Pereid Meteor Shower: Notable images submitted to APOD

Photo by Sergio Scauso

She will remember not of our yesterday,
as all thoughts are gone. Gone away.
Escaped from that lovely mind of hers.
Escaped in the words of this new verse.

Is there pain, when a heart breaks?
When infatuation of a first encounter,
has worn thin and mixed emotions
have become calloused, much too soon.
Those feelings of a long lost love,
resurface for reasons, I know not why.
Perhaps to rekindle, a long ago flame.
No matter the reason or the cause,
the feelings of loss arise once more,
leaving you to wonder and ask why?

Of what I write
and what you read,
may differ now
for I will cede,
thoughts you have,
are yours. Proceed
to a place in time,
where you may plead
and it may rhyme.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Why is this nebula so complex? When a star like our Sun is dying, it will cast off its outer layers, usually into a simple overall shape. Sometimes this shape is a sphere, sometimes a double lobe, and sometimes a ring or a helix. In the case of planetary nebula NGC 5189, however, besides an overall "Z" shape (the featured image is flipped horizontally and so appears as an "S"), no such simple structure has emerged. To help find out why, the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope has observed NGC 5189 in great detail. Previous findings indicated the existence of multiple epochs of material outflow, including a recent one that created a bright but distorted torus running horizontally across image center. Hubble results appear consistent with a hypothesis that the dying star is part of a binary star system with a precessing symmetry axis. NGC 5189 spans about three light years and lies about 3,000 light years away toward the southern constellation of the Fly (Musca).

 This Greek salad is easy to throw together. With cherry and pear tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese, shallots, mint, and oregano. Click the image below to see Elise Bauer's recipe at Simply Recipes

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What planets are those behind that unusual rock spire? Saturn (lower left) and Jupiter.  This month, after sunset, the bright planetary duo are quite prominent toward the southeast.  Now your view of our Solar System's largest planets might not include a picturesque hoodoo in the foreground, nor the spectacular central band of our Milky Way Galaxy across the background, but should be quite eye-catching anyway.  The featured image is a composite of consecutive foreground and background exposures all taken in late May with the same camera and from the same location -- the badlands of the  Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness in the San Juan Basin in New Mexico, USA.  The rock spire, informally dubbed 'Alien Throne', stands about 3 meters tall. Saturn and Jupiter will remain visible together after sunset for several months.

Photo by Marcin Zając

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ...Continue reading 

Write the words that pour forth.
Think not of the meanings
or the time. There is no
reason, I'd understand
if I could not write
words in the sand.
The sands of time and
life our hate has caused
most looks of awe,
makes some sense,
comes to me but I cannot
for my hands are free
to do the tasks God
sent to me. Write down your feelings.
Do it now. Do not worry
about how they may sound,
if you are alone. Just stay
away from that darn phone.
The phone has become your brain,
not your love but a disdain
of not having a Social contact
today. So I'll leave and run from here
and try hard to just go and disappear.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Keep your eye on the ion tail of Comet NEOWISE. A tale of this tail is the trail of the Earth. As with all comets, the blue ion tail always points away from the Sun. But as Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) rounded our Sun, its ion tail pointed in slightly different directions. This is because between 2020 July 17 and July 25 when the featured images were taken, the Earth moved noticeably in its orbit around the Sun. But the Earth's motion made the Sun appear to shift in the sky. So even though you can't see the Sun directly in the featured image(s), the directions of the ion tails reveal this apparent solar shift. The Sun's apparent motion is in the ecliptic, the common plane where all planets orbit. The featured five image composite was meticulously composed to accurately place each comet image -- and the five extrapolated solar positions -- on a single foreground image of Turó de l'Home Mountain, north of Barcelona, Spain Comet NEOWISE is no longer the impressive naked-eye object it was last month, but it can still be found with a small telescope as it heads back to the outer Solar System.

Photo by Ignacio Llorens

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