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Explore major historical events from today or any day on Kudos 365.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Is there a spiral galaxy in the center of this spiral galaxy? Sort of. Image data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory, and smaller telescopes on planet Earth are combined in this detailed portrait of face-on spiral galaxy Messier 61 (M61) and its bright center. A mere 55 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies, M61 is also known as NGC 4303. It's considered to be an example of a barred spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way. Like other spiral galaxies, M61 also features sweeping spiral arms, cosmic dust lanes, pinkish star forming regions, and young blue star clusters. Its core houses an active supermassive black hole surrounded by a bright nuclear spiral -- infalling star-forming gas that itself looks like a separate spiral galaxy. APOD Turns 30!: Free public lecture in Cork, Ireland TONIGHT (Tuesday) at 7 pm

Interior of old town hall in Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany.

A.Savin, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How do stars form? Images of the star forming region W5 like those in the infrared by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE, later NEOWISE) satellite provide clear clues with indications that massive stars near the center of empty cavities are older than stars near the edges. A likely reason for this is that the older stars in the center are actually triggering the formation of the younger edge stars. The triggered star formation occurs when hot outflowing gas compresses cooler gas into knots dense enough to gravitationally contract into stars. In the featured scientifically colored infrared image, spectacular pillars left slowly evaporating from the hot outflowing gas provide further visual clues. W5 is also known as Westerhout 5 (W5) and IC 1848. Together with IC 1805, the nebulas form a complex region of star formation popularly dubbed the Heart and Soul Nebulas. The featured image highlights a part of W5 spanning about 2,000 light years that is rich in star forming pillars. W5 lies about 6,500 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia. APOD Turns 30!: Free public lecture in Cork, Ireland tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7 pm

Photo by : Francesco Antonucci

Functionalist tower of the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, Finland, designed by Yrjö Lindegren and Toivo Jäntti.

Óðinn, CC BY-SA 2.5 ca, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

William Orville Douglas (1898 – 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States for 36 years from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views and as a strong defender of the First Amendment. Born in Maine, Minnesota, Douglas moved west with his family to California and then to Yakima, Washington after the death of his father. He chaired  the Securities and Exchange Commission before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He is the longest-serving justice in history to date.

Quote Source: Douglas delivered this message in a talk to the Authors Guild Council in New York on December 3, 1951. He received the 1951 Lauterbach Award for his defense of civil liberties at the event, according to the American Library Association. 

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How were these unusual Martian spherules created? Thousands of unusual gray spherules made of iron and rock and dubbed blueberries were found embedded in and surrounding rocks near the landing site of the robot Opportunity rover on Mars in 2004. To help investigate their origin, Opportunity found a surface dubbed the Berry Bowl with an indentation that was rich in the Martian orbs. The Berry Bowl is pictured here, imaged during rover's 48th Martian day. The average size of a Martian blueberry rock is only about 4 millimeters across. By analyzing a circular patch in the rock surface to the left of the densest patch of spherules, Opportunity obtained data showing that the underlying rock has a much different composition than the hematite rich blueberries. This information contributes to the growing consensus that these small, strange, gray orbs were slowly deposited from a bath of dirty water. APOD Turns 30!: Free Public Lecture in Cork, Ireland on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 pm

This stained glass window located in the Basilica of St. James and St. Agnes, a church in Nysa, Poland, depicts angels adoring the sacred host and wine during an epiclesis to the Holy Spirit, represented as a dove. Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi, which is observed as a religious celebration in much of Western Christianity and as a public holiday in various nations.

Pudelek (Marcin Szala), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

         Sufficient
Citron, pomegranate,
     Apricot, and peach,
  Flutter of apple-blows
     Whiter than the snow,
  Filling the silence
     With their leafy speech,
  Budding and blooming
     Down row after row.

Breaths of blown spices,
     Which the meadows yield,
  Blossoms broad-petaled,
     Starry buds and small;
  Gold of the hill-sides,
     Purple of the field,
  Waft to my nostrils
     Their fragrance, one and all.

Birds in the tree-tops,
     Birds that fill the air,
  Trilling, piping, singing,
     In their merry moods, —
  Gold wing and brown wing,
     Flitting here and here,
  To the coo and chirrup
     Of their downy broods.

What grace has summer
     Better that can suit?
  What gift can autumn
     Bring us more to please?
  Red of blown roses,
     Mellow tints of fruit,
  Never can be fairer,
     Sweeter than are these.

Ina Donna Coolbrith  (1841 – 1928) American poet, writer and librarian. She was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state. Born Josephine Donna Smith, she was the niece of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She left the Mormon community as a child to enter her teens in Los Angeles, California, where she began to publish poetry. She later made her home in San Francisco, where she formed the "Golden Gate Trinity". with writers Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard. Her poetry received positive notice from critics and established poets such as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
This poem is in the public domain.