Public Posts

Roof of the Milan Cathedral, Milan, Italy.

Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

James A. Michener - (February 3, 1907 - October 16, 1997)

JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Active galaxy NGC 1275 is the central, dominant member of the large and relatively nearby Perseus Cluster of Galaxies. Wild-looking at visible wavelengths, the active galaxy is also a prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission. NGC 1275 accretes matter as entire galaxies fall into it, ultimately feeding a supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core. Narrowband image data used in this sharp telescopic image highlights the resulting galactic debris and filaments of glowing gas, some up to 20,000 light-years long. The filaments persist in NGC 1275, even though the turmoil of galactic collisions should destroy them. What keeps the filaments together? Observations indicate that the structures, pushed out from the galaxy's center by the black hole's activity, are held together by magnetic fields. Also known as Perseus A, NGC 1275 itself spans over 100,000 light years and lies about 230 million light years away.

Photo by Michal Wierzbinski

Leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) young female in Kruger National Park, South Africa.

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

              Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.

William Blake - (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Although Blake was largely unrecognized during his life, he is now considered an influential figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, but he is now held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. Read more

Zane Lee on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Most galaxies don't have any rings -- why does this galaxy have three? To begin, a ring that's near NGC 1512's center -- and so hard to see here -- is the nuclear ring which glows brightly with recently formed stars. Next out is a ring of stars and dust appearing both red and blue, called, counter-intuitively, the inner ring. This inner ring connects ends of a diffuse central bar of stars that runs horizontally across the galaxy. Farthest out in this wide field image is a ragged structure that might be considered an outer ring. This outer ring appears spiral-like and is dotted with clusters of bright blue stars. All these ring structures are thought to be affected by NGC 1512's own gravitational asymmetries in a drawn-out process called secular evolution. The featured image was captured last month from a telescope at Deep Sky Chile in Chile.

Photo by Daniel Stern

30th St. Moritz Polo World Cup on Snow.

Clément Bucco-Lechat, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.