Public Posts Stanwood, WA Stanwood, WA (zoom)

A swift coat
of fallen snow.
Nature's brush strokes
are the show.

My garden spade.
A work of art,
broke when I
tried to lift a rock.
The tool was strong,
until it busted,
for the handle
had simply, rusted.

Depression, my old friend.
I can see,
you have come back,
just for me.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What will the huge Green Bank Telescope discover tonight? Pictured, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) on the lower right is the largest fully-pointable single-dish radio telescope in the world. With a central dish larger than a football field, the GBT is nestled in the hills of West Virginia, USA in a radio quiet zone where the use of cell phones, WiFi emitters, and even microwave ovens are limited. The GBT explores our universe not only during the night -- but during the day, too, since the daytime sky is typically dark in radio waves. Taken in late January, the featured image was planned for months to get the setting location of Orion just right. The image is a composite of a foreground shot taken over a kilometer away from the GBT, and a background shot built up of long exposures during the previous night. The deep background image of Orion is fitting because the GBT is famous for, among many discoveries, mapping the unusual magnetic field in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.

Photo by Dave Green

Leave me be,
I cannot see,
My love's smiling
At myself, me.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to involve supermassive black holes in the centers of active galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though. Featured, recent data has enabled an artist's impression of an early-universe quasar as it might have been: centered on a massive black hole, surrounded by sheets of gas and an accretion disk, and expelling a powerful jet. Quasars are among the most distant objects we see and give humanity unique information about the early and intervening universe. The oldest quasars currently known are seen at just short of redshift 8 -- only 700 million years after the Big Bang -- when the universe was only a few percent of its current age.

Eating at night,
so late in the day,
cannot be healthy
but it is my way.

I visit my wife,
and help her to bed.
I come home,
there's no one here.

Eating alone,
is what I do.
Something light
will always be,
my food of choice
as I think of thee.

Tulips are poking
through the ground.
Wishing the rabbit
leaves them alone..

Attributed to Gil Stern

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in this image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole. Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 6217, which spans about 30,000 light years across and can be found toward the constellation of the Little Bear (Ursa Minor). APOD in world languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Beijing), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, French (Canada), German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Montenegrin, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Taiwanese, Turkish, Turkish, and Ukrainian

Ember filled ashes
cover the ground,
here in the green,
of our Puget Sound.
Arsonists exist
their fires abound,
in this beautiful place,
we call Puget Sound.

I choose not to write
words, joyless and bare,
for I have nothing
in the memory vault,
at least I surmise,
from my empty soul.