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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A mere 11 million light-years away, Centaurus A is the closest active galaxy to planet Earth. Spanning over 60,000 light-years, the peculiar elliptical galaxy also known as NGC 5128, is featured in this sharp telescopic view. Centaurus A is apparently the result of a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies resulting in a fantastic jumble of star clusters and imposing dark dust lanes. Near the galaxy's center, leftover cosmic debris is steadily being consumed by a central black hole with a billion times the mass of the Sun. As in other active galaxies, that process likely generates the enormous radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray energy radiated by Centaurus A.

Photo by David Alemazkour

This Guacamole version is inspired by the Chipotle Mexican Grill's lime and cilantro-spiked guacamole with its hint of spice from the Jalapenos and the shot of lime Read more

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of radiations around you -- is the observable universe. In light, the farthest we can see comes from the cosmic microwave background, a time 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was opaque like thick fog. Some neutrinos and gravitational waves that surround us come from even farther out, but humanity does not yet have the technology to detect them. The featured image illustrates the observable universe on an increasingly compact scale, with the Earth and Sun at the center surrounded by our Solar System, nearby stars, nearby galaxies, distant galaxies, filaments of early matter, and the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists typically assume that our observable universe is just the nearby part of a greater entity known as "the universe" where the same physics applies. However, there are several lines of popular but speculative reasoning that assert that even our universe is part of a greater multiverse where either different physical constants occur, different physical laws apply, higher dimensions operate, or slightly different-by-chance versions of our standard universe exist. Available: High res image version with readable annotations | Clickable annotation version

If I could capture your Soul
and place it in a jar,
I would carry it with me
knowing where you are.

Slow ticks the clock
as we await the end
of this lifetime, our
broken dreams trend.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Pictured -- a very scenic road to the stars. The road approaches La Silla Observatory in Chile, with the ESO's 3.6-meter telescope just up ahead. To the left are some futuristic-looking support structures for the planned BlackGEM telescopes, an array of optical telescopes that will help locate optical counterparts to gravitational waves detections by LIGO and other detectors. But there is much more. Red airglow illuminates the night sky on the right, while the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy slants across the image center. Jupiter can be seen just above the band near the image center, while Saturn is visible just above the 3.6-meter telescope dome. The two largest satellite galaxies of our Milky Way Galaxy, the LMC and SMC, are seen on the far right. The featured image panorama was built up from multiple 15-second exposures that were captured on 2019 June 30. Two days later, La Silla experienced a rare total eclipse of the Sun.

Janet Sobel (1893 – 1968) Born as Jennie Olechovskyat was a Ukrainian-American Abstract Expressionist painter whose career started mid-life  age forty-five in 1938. Sobel was the first artist to use the drip painting technique that directly influenced Jackson Pollock. She was credited as exhibiting the first instance of all-over painting seen by Clement Greenberg, a notable art critic. Read more.. There is also an interesting BBC article about her "The woman written out of history" By Kelly Grovier

This image is marked as Public Domain Mark 1.0 by CC

I now write of sadness.
No longer the joy
as life drags on,
day after day.
There is no fun
no time to play
when I visit her
every day.
What kind of life
is this to have,
when your loved one
has no memories
of being together.

The glass dangles
from my hand
as I search my
soul and demand
answers to the riddle
of what is to be,
when life ends
the likes of me.

Why must I live today
when my love, my life
has gone astray?
I am missing my wife
as she used to be,
when we were all happy
and were always free
to share our memories
of what life was to be,
based upon all we knew,
the love of you and me.

A painful but true Russian joke tweeted by Garry Kasparov earlier this year:  http://twitter.com/Kasparov63

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Where do stars form? One place, star forming regions known as "EGGs", are being uncovered at the end of this giant pillar of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16). Short for evaporating gaseous globules, EGGs are dense regions of mostly molecular hydrogen gas that fragment and gravitationally collapse to form stars. Light from the hottest and brightest of these new stars heats the end of the pillar and causes further evaporation of gas and dust -- revealing yet more EGGs and more young stars. This featured picture was created from exposures spanning over 30 hours with the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, and digitally processed with modern software by experienced volunteers in Argentina. Newborn stars will gradually destroy their birth pillars over the next 100,000 years or so -- if a supernova doesn't destroy them first.