Contributor Posts

George Santayana - (1863 – 1952) ~ Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, critic and novelist. Born in Spain and raised and educated in the US from the age of eight. He left his position at Harvard at the age of 48 and returned to Europe permanently. Santayana was the author of many books and is popularly known for his aphorisms. He was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's life and thought. Although he was an atheist, he treasured the Spanish Catholic values, practices, and worldview in which he was raised.

Quote source: –The Life of Reason: Reason in Society, Scribner

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This kilometer high cliff occurs on the surface of a comet. It was discovered on the dark nucleus of Comet Churyumov - Gerasimenko (CG) by Rosetta, a robotic spacecraft launched by ESA, which orbited the comet from 2014 to 2016. The ragged cliff, as featured here, was imaged by Rosetta early in its mission. Although towering about one kilometer high, the low surface gravity of Comet CG would likely make a jump from the cliffs by a human survivable. At the foot of the cliffs is relatively smooth terrain dotted with boulders as large as 20 meters across. Data from Rosetta indicates that the ice in Comet CG has a significantly different deuterium fraction -- and hence likely a different origin -- than the water in Earth's oceans. The probe was named after the Rosetta Stone, a rock slab featuring the same text written in three different languages that helped humanity decipher ancient Egyptian writing.

A foggy winter morning in Moulvibazar District, Bangladesh. Today is Victory Day in Bangladesh.

Abdul Momin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Eduardo Hughes Galeano, (1940 - 2015) was an Uruguayan journalist, writer, poet and novelist. Among his many books, Galiano's best-known works are "Las venas abiertas de América Latina" (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) and ""Memoria del fuego" (Memory of Fire Trilogy - 1982–6). "I'm a writer," the author once said of himself, "I am obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia. His first or paternal surname is Hughes and the second or maternal family name is Galeano. His two family names were inherited from Welsh and Italian great-grandfathers; the other two were from Germany and Spain. Galeano wrote under his maternal family name.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Meteors have been flowing out from the constellation Gemini. This was expected, as mid-December is the time of the Geminid Meteor Shower. Pictured here, over two dozen meteors were caught in successively added exposures taken over several hours early Saturday morning from a snowy forest in Poland. The fleeting streaks were bright enough to be seen over the din of the nearly full Moon on the upper right. These streaks can all be traced back to a point on the sky called the radiant toward the bright stars Pollux and Castor in the image center. The Geminid meteors started as sand sized bits expelled from asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its elliptical orbit through the inner Solar System. Jigsaw Challenge: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photo by Jakub Kuřák

Jewish cemetery in Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit. Small reaction control thrusters are at the sides of the moonship with the bell of the ascent rocket engine underneath. The hatch allowing access to the lunar surface is seen at the front, with a round radar antenna at the top. Mission commander Gene Cernan is clearly visible through the triangular window. This spaceship performed gracefully, landing on the Moon and returning the Apollo astronauts to the orbiting command module in December of 1972. So where is Challenger now? Its descent stage remains at the Apollo 17 landing site in the Taurus-Littrow valley. The ascent stage pictured was intentionally crashed nearby after being jettisoned from the command module prior to the astronauts' return to planet Earth.

Overview of the city of Horta, one of the three capitals of the archipelago, during the blue hour from Monte da Guia, Faial Island, Azores, Portugal.

Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

An intriguing pair of interacting galaxies, M51 is the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with whirlpool-like spiral structure seen nearly face-on is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes sweep in front of its smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195. Some 31 million light-years distant, within the boundaries of the well-trained constellation Canes Venatici, M51 looks faint and fuzzy to the eye in direct telescopic views. But this remarkably deep image shows off stunning details of the galaxy pair's striking colors and fainter tidal streams. The image includes extensive narrowband data to highlight a vast reddish cloud of ionized hydrogen gas recently discovered in the M51 system and known to some as the H-alpha cliffs. Foreground dust clouds in the Milky Way and distant background galaxies are captured in the wide-field view. A continuing collaboration of astro-imagers using telescopes on planet Earth assembled over 3 weeks of exposure time to create this evolving portrait of M51. Watch: The 2024 Geminid Meteor Shower

Photo by The Deep Sky Collective