Public Posts

Welcome to the Kudos 365 History Challenge. Test your knowledge and see how many you can answer.

Looking through these three windows on history reminds us that while the tools of civilization evolve, the human story continues to be driven by many of the same hopes, challenges, and ambitions that have shaped every generation. Continue reading 

Seed pods of a Silene dioica. Focus stack of 40 photos.

Dominicus Johannes Bergsma., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Photo by Julien Looten

Photograph of Louis Armstrong playing Trumpet by Harry Warnecke and Gus Schoenbaechler, 1947. Armstrong died on this day 55 years ago.

Harry Warnecke / Gus Schoenbaechler, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as snow. To help better understand this unusually tinted moon, in 2007 NASA directed the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting Saturn to swoop within 2,000 kilometers. Pictured here, from about 75,000 kilometers out, is the hemisphere of Iapetus that is always trailing. A large impact crater seen in the south spans 500 kilometers and appears superposed on an older crater of similar size. The dark material is seen increasingly coating the easternmost part of Iapetus, darkening craters and highlands alike. A leading hypothesis is that the dark material is mostly a form of carbon-rich soil leftover from when relatively warm but dirty ice sublimates. An initial coating of this dark material may have been effectively painted on by the accretion of meteor-liberated debris from other moons. Jigsaw Moon: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photographic art based on pastel chalks, taken in Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, GermanyThe photo was taken using ICM technique and multiple exposure.

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