Public Posts Bellevue, WA Bellevue, WA (zoom)

I enjoyed your laughter.
I enjoyed your smile.
I will enjoy your company,
for a long, long while.

When your mood colors,
turn to grey.
When thoughts leave
and go away,
create a vacuum,
of time, no space.
Do I still belong,
in the Human Race?
When sadness
is your daily mood,
if it happens,
it's never good.
Add some humor,
please do it now,
without laughter,
there is no now.

Ice cold the heart
of hatred springs
causing more pain
than necessary.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What it would look like to leave planet Earth? Such an event was recorded visually in great detail by the MESSENGER spacecraft as it swung back past the Earth in 2005 on its way in toward the planet Mercury. Earth can be seen rotating in this time-lapse video, as it recedes into the distance. The sunlit half of Earth is so bright that background stars are not visible. The robotic MESSENGER spacecraft is now in orbit around Mercury and has recently concluded the first complete map of the surface. On occasion, MESSENGER has continued to peer back at its home world. MESSENGER is one of the few things created on the Earth that will never return. At the end of its mission MESSENGER crashed into Mercury's surface.

I try to put
the words to paper
as music plays
in the background.
Hard to focus on
the task at hand,
when the background
music lyrics,
staccato beat from
Bruce Springsteen,
is ringing in your ears.
Need to reload.

I wrest the pain
from within my heart,
a collection of
personal failures.

A pain of witness,
watching my wife's
mental acuity,
in a slow decline
from Dementia
to Alzheimer's.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Ridges of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds inhabit the turbulent, cosmic depths of the Lagoon Nebula. Also known as M8, the bright star forming region is about 5,000 light-years distant. But it still makes for a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius, toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dominated by the telltale red emission of ionized hydrogen atoms recombining with stripped electrons, this stunning, deep view of the Lagoon is nearly 100 light-years across. Right of center, the bright, compact, hourglass shape is gas ionized and sculpted by energetic radiation and extreme stellar winds from a massive young star. In fact, although digitally removed from the featured image, the many bright stars of open cluster NGC 6530 drift within the nebula, just formed in the Lagoon several million years ago.

Photo by Sameer Dhar

William Frederick Halsey Jr. or Bull Halsey (1882 – 1959) Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was a fleet admiral in the United States Navy during World War II. He is one of four individuals to have attained the rank of fleet admiral, the others being Ernest King, William Leahy, and Chester W. Nimitz.

Disappointment appears
in her eyes,
when she tries
and realizes,
she can no longer
do most of her
daily routine.

Few artists have articulated the dance between this “divine discontent” and creative fulfillment more memorably than the poet, novelist, essayist, and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995). In her Journal of a Solitude (public library), Sarton records and reflects on her interior life in the course of one year, her sixtieth, with remarkable candor and courage. Out of these twelve private months arises the eternity of the human experience with its varied universal capacities for astonishment and sorrow, hollowing despair and creative vitality.

Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's that green streak in front of the Andromeda galaxy? A meteor. While photographing the Andromeda galaxy in 2016, near the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, a small pebble from deep space crossed right in front of our Milky Way Galaxy's far-distant companion. The small meteor took only a fraction of a second to pass through this 10-degree field. The meteor flared several times while braking violently upon entering Earth's atmosphere. The green color was created, at least in part, by the meteor's gas glowing as it vaporized. Although the exposure was timed to catch a Perseid meteor, the orientation of the imaged streak seems a better match to a meteor from the Southern Delta Aquariids, a meteor shower that peaked a few weeks earlier. Not coincidentally, the Perseid Meteor Shower peaks later this week, although this year the meteors will have to outshine a sky brightened by a nearly full moon.

Photo by Fritz Helmut Hemmerich