Contributor Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Where can you find dragons fighting in the night sky? In the southern constellation of the Altar: Ara. The dragons are, of course, actually made of suggestively shaped gas and dust. The celestial home of the mythological battling beasts is cataloged as NGC 6188 and located about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud. Massive, young stars of the embedded Ara OB1 association were formed there only a few million years ago, sculpting the dark shapes and powering the nebular glow with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. Joining NGC 6188 on this cosmic canvas, visible toward the lower right, is unusual emission nebula NGC 6164, also created by one of the region's massive stars. This impressively wide field picture, captured from Queensland, Australia, spans over 2 degrees (four full Moons).

Photo by Rod Prazeres

Seed pods of a Silene dioica. Focus stack of 40 photos.

Dominicus Johannes Bergsma., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Every community has stories worth preserving. Old photographs. Family stories. Historic buildings. Local traditions. Newspaper clippings. Memories passed down through generations. Help preserve the history of your community by sharing stories about the people, places, and events that made it special. Do you have an old photograph, a family story, or knowledge about your community's past? Share it today, every contribution adds another piece to the story and helps preserve it for future generations.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Photo by Julien Looten

Photograph of Louis Armstrong playing Trumpet by Harry Warnecke and Gus Schoenbaechler, 1947. Armstrong died on this day 55 years ago.

Harry Warnecke / Gus Schoenbaechler, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as snow. To help better understand this unusually tinted moon, in 2007 NASA directed the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting Saturn to swoop within 2,000 kilometers. Pictured here, from about 75,000 kilometers out, is the hemisphere of Iapetus that is always trailing. A large impact crater seen in the south spans 500 kilometers and appears superposed on an older crater of similar size. The dark material is seen increasingly coating the easternmost part of Iapetus, darkening craters and highlands alike. A leading hypothesis is that the dark material is mostly a form of carbon-rich soil leftover from when relatively warm but dirty ice sublimates. An initial coating of this dark material may have been effectively painted on by the accretion of meteor-liberated debris from other moons. Jigsaw Moon: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photographic art based on pastel chalks, taken in Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, GermanyThe photo was taken using ICM technique and multiple exposure.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

On July 4th, 1997, using its own array of fireworks, a parachute, and a cocoon of airbags, the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft bounced like a giant beach ball at least 15 times before it came to rest on the surface of Mars at 10:07 AM Pacific Daylight Time. After its then novel airbag-assisted landing sequence was completed, Pathfinder transmitted this color mosaic to mission operators on Earth. In the scene from another world, the Mars Sojourner robot rover is visible in the foreground, crouched on top of the unfolded Pathfinder. About the size of a large house cat, the six-wheeled, solar-powered Sojourner became the first successful Martian rover. Surrounding Pathfinder are deflated airbags and the rock-strewn terrain of the Ares Vallis floodplain. In the distance Martian hills appear against a dusty brownish sky. The Pathfinder lander was subsequently renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.