Magazine Posts

By Kevin Bessat on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Looking toward the north from Mullion, New South Wales, Australia, the Andromeda Galaxy never gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. During the southern hemisphere spring, Andromeda is highest in the sky around midnight though. And in this telephoto scene from October 10/11, multiple exposures were used to reveal the spiral galaxy in tantalizing detail as it climbed above rolling Australian hills. Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy is one of the brightest objects in the Messier catalog, but is only visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch. Digitally tracked and stacked frames were combined with a foreground shot in the deep astro-image composite to reveal the galaxy's greater extent in planet Earth's night. In the springtime night skyscape,the closest large spiral galaxy spans nearly 6 full moons.

Photo by Lucy Yunxi Hu

Vodno Telecommunication Tower under construction in Skopje, North Macedonia. Today is the Day of the Macedonian Revolutionary Struggle, a national holiday in North Macedonia celebrated on the occasion of the formation of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.

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

William Golding (1911-1993) Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet.He was born on September 19, 1911 in St Columb Minor, Cornwall, England, UK. He was the author of Lord of the Flies (1990), Lord of the Flies (1963) and Alkitrang Dugo (1975). Biography

Jez Timms on Unsplash

And now the sun in tinted splendor sank,
  The west was all aglow with crimson light;
The bay seemed like a sheet of burnished gold,
  Its waters glistened with such radiance bright.

At anchor lay the yachts with snow-white sails,
  Outlined against the glowing, rose-hued sky.
No ripple stirred the waters’ calm repose
  Save when a tiny craft sped lightly by.

Our boat was drifting slowly, gently round,
  To rest secure till evening shadows fell;
No sound disturbed the stillness of the air,
  Save the soft chiming of the vesper bell.

Yes, drifting, drifting; and I thought that life,
  When nearing death, is like the sunset sky:
And death is but the slow, sure drifting in
  To rest far more securely, by and by.

Then let me drift along the Bay of Time,
  Till my last sun shall set in glowing light;
Let me cast anchor where no shadows fall,
  Forever moored within Heaven’s harbor bright.

This poem is in the public domain.

Olivia Ward Bush-Banks - née Olivia Ward; (1869 – 1944) was an American author, poet and journalist of African-American and Montaukett Native American heritage. Ward celebrated both of her heritages in her poetry and writing. She was a regular contributor to the Colored American magazine and wrote a column for the New Rochelle, New York publication, the Westchester Record-Courier. More at Wikipedia

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Star light, star bright: is there a green star out tonight? Other than the Sun, all stars are so far from Earth that they appear as points in the sky. They are mostly white, but sometimes noticeably red or blue. This color typically relates to the temperature: blue stars are hotter than red stars. What about other colors? The featured image is an illustration showing WD J1330+6435, a white dwarf star, surrounded by an accretion disk with gas and rocks orbiting the star. White dwarfs are small, faint stars that are left over when a star like the Sun exhausts its nuclear fuel. Astronomers recently found that some white dwarf stars, despite their name, would appear yellow, green, cyan, pink, or purple. In these cases, trace elements that were accreted to these stars interact with the stellar atmosphere and shift its normally white color. But, alas! I wish I may, I wish I might, but they are too faint to see tonight...

Photo by Mark A. Garlick/University of Warwick

Jim Buckley’s Red Dragon sculpture from 1985 during River Lee flooding, October 2023.

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

Photo taken near Franschhoek, South Africa.
Byron Breytenbach on Unsplash