Public Posts Bellevue, WA Bellevue, WA (zoom)

When reality comes
to your bed,
as you search for words,
which you have read.

There will be time,
when danger is near,
and your memories,
will disappear.

Talk to me about tomorrow.
Talk to me about today.
Talk to me, about when,
my beloved goes away.

Spare me the platitudes,
those I don't need,
just share in my sorrow,
and provide my soul with feed.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Does this nebula look like the head of a witch? The nebula is known popularly as the Witch Head Nebula because, it is said, the nebula's shape resembles a Halloween-style caricature of a witch's head. Exactly how, though, can be a topic of imaginative speculation. What is clear is that IC 2118 is about 50 light-years across and made of gas and dust that points to -- because it has been partly eroded by -- the nearby star Rigel. One of the brighter stars in the constellation Orion, Rigel lies below the bottom of the featured image. The blue color of the Witch Head Nebula and is caused not only by Rigel's intense blue starlight but because the dust grains scatter blue light more efficiently than red. The same physical process causes Earth's daytime sky to appear blue, although the scatterers in planet Earth's atmosphere are molecules of nitrogen and oxygen.

Photo by Abdullah Alharbi

The national debt is composed of distinct types of debt, similar to an individual whose debt may consist of a mortgage, car loan, and credit cards. The different types of debt include non-marketable or marketable securities and whether it is debt held by the public or debt held by the government itself (known as intragovernmental). The U.S. has carried debt since its inception. Debts incurred during the American Revolutionary War amounted to $75 million, primarily borrowed from domestic investors and the French Government for war materials. More at the US Department of the Treasury ➜ 

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Do you see the hourglass shape -- or does it see you? If you can picture it, the rings of MyCn 18 trace the outline of an hourglass -- although one with an unusual eye in its center. Either way, the sands of time are running out for the central star of this hourglass-shaped planetary nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a Sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected - its core becoming a cooling, fading white dwarf. In 1995, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to make a series of images of planetary nebulae, including the one featured here. Pictured, delicate rings of colorful glowing gas (nitrogen-red, hydrogen-green, and oxygen-blue) outline the tenuous walls of the hourglass. The unprecedented sharpness of the Hubble images has revealed surprising details of the nebula ejection process that are helping to resolve the outstanding mysteries of the complex shapes and symmetries of planetary nebulas like MyCn 18.

Photo by NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak

Of this I am certain,
from this I know,
if you don't step forward,
you've nowhere to go.

In the beginning,
take one step at a time.
Have some cheese and crackers
and a bottle of wine.

Alone,
she sits.
No one at the table.
How must this feel?

She doesn't know
or understand
and yet, when
I go to leave,

I see sadness,
but the words
won't come
to her.

Does she understand,
but can't explain?
I don't know,
but what if

she does know?
Is that
a tenable issue?

Upward, the wind burst,
into the sky.
Upward the kite flew,
on winds up high.

It did rain,
plants wet with dew.
Thinking of memories,
about me and you.

Fill the pot slowly,
before I can't
have the strength.
Should I now rant?

Rant about things,
out of our control.
A wasting of life,
oh, what a toll.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is red sprite lightning, which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the past 25 years. The origins of all types of lightning remain topics for research, and scientists are still trying to figure out why red sprite lightning occurs at all. Research has shown that following a powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strike, red sprites may start as 100-meter balls of ionized air that shoot down from about 80-km high at 10 percent the speed of light. They are quickly followed by a group of upward streaking ionized balls. Featured here is an extraordinarily high-resolution image of a group of red sprites. This image is a single frame lasting only 1/25th of a second from a video taken above Castelnaud Castle in Dordogne, France, about three weeks ago. The sprites quickly vanished -- no sprites were visible even on the very next video frame.

Photo by Nicolas Escurat

André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 - 1951)  French author known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works. He authored more than fifty books and he was the winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy and became a prolific writer at an early age. He published his first novel, "The Notebooks of André Walter" (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter) at the age of twenty-one.