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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Direct your gaze through this gap with binoculars or small telescope and you are looking through a window over 300 light-years wide at stars some 10,000 light-years or more from Earth. Sometimes called the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, M24's luminous stars fill this gorgeous starscape. Covering over 3 degrees or the width of 6 full moons in the constellation Sagittarius, the telescopic field of view includes dark markings B92 and B93 near center, along with other clouds of dust and glowing nebulae toward the center of the Milky Way.

Photo by Touhid biplob, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Days zip by,
quicker than I think.
I'll say this now,
I need a shrink.

Who puts a word
like love, into play?
A four-letter word,
meaning, have a great day.

I can't say I love you,
because I'm a married man.
What does that mean?
I don't understand.

When love was young,
my mind was new.
All my thoughts of love,
were about you.

Now I'm an elder,
my mind will stay,
as my thoughts of love,
refuse to go away.

Looking in the mirror,
not sure what I see,
an old, wrinkled face,
looking back at me.

Cecilia Payne's work on the nature of variable stars showed that the wide variation in stellar spectra is due mainly to the different ionization states of the atoms and hence different surface temperatures of the stars, not to different amounts of the elements. Concluding that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking work from almost 100 years ago, was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. More

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

These two global views of Mars were captured at ultraviolet wavelengths, beyond the spectrum visible to human eyes. Recorded by the MAVEN spacecraft's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument in July 2022 (left) and January 2023, three otherwise invisible ultraviolet bands are mapped into red, green, and blue colors. That color scheme presents the Red Planet's surface features in shades of tan and green. Haze and clouds appear white or blue, while high altitude ozone takes on a dramatic purple hue. On the left, Mars' south polar ice cap is in brilliant white at the bottom but shrinking during the southern hemisphere's summer season. On the right, the northern hemisphere's polar region is seen shrouded in clouds and atmospheric ozone. Known to some as the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft, MAVEN has been exploring Mars' tenuous upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and its interactions with the Sun and solar wind since 2014.

              Ophelia

My sister went with the Angels,
Years before I was born,
Her photo, always displayed,
Was a normal part of our home.

The pain from her early departure,
Came out slowly, a bit at a time,
And yet, not fully understood,
By the mind of the child I was.

Her photo, now in my home,
Is displayed just as before,
And I still wonder why and why not,
Not understanding, yet unable to ignore.

All Copyrights are reserved: Calob 2023

I write one line
of loving words,
my eye moistens.
How absurd.