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Explore major historical events from today or any day on Kudos 365.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's at the tip of this interstellar jet? First let's consider the jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH 49). The star system expelling this jet is not visible -- it is off to the lower right. The complex conical structure featured in this infrared image by the James Webb Space Telescope also includes another jet cataloged as HH 50. The fast jet particles impact the surrounding interstellar gas and form shock waves that glow prominently in infrared light -- shown here as reddish-brown ridges. This JWST image also resolved the mystery of the unusual object at HH 49's tip: it is a spiral galaxy far in the distance. The blue center is therefore not one star but many, and the surrounding circular rings are actually spiral arms. Jump Around the Universe: Random APOD Generator

A modernist staircase of the BGK Building in Gdynia, Poland.

Bart Lumber, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

BUT WE HAD MUSIC

Right this minute
across time zones and opinions
people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poems

while

at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of
four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
of oblivion.

Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.

I know this.

And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is enough

to stand here
for an irrevocable minute
agape with wonder.

It is eternity.

By Maria Popova Read more at the Marginalian

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes, the Moon visits the Pleiades. Technically, this means that the orbit of our Moon takes it directly in front of the famous Pleiades star cluster, which is far in the distance. The technical term for the event is an occultation, and the Moon is famous for its rare occultations of all planets and several well-known bright stars. The Moon's tilted and precessing orbit makes its occultations of the Seven Sisters star cluster bunchy, with the current epoch starting in 2023 continuing monthly until 2029. After that, though, the next occultation won't occur until 2042. Taken from Cantabria, Spain on April 1, the featured image is a composite where previous exposures of the Pleiades from the same camera and location were digitally added to the last image to bring up the star cluster's iconic blue glow. Jigsaw Challenge: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Portrait of a geometric moray (Gymnothorax griseus), Red Sea, Egypt. This moray eel belongs to the family Muraenidae and is found throughout the western Indian Ocean and Red Sea at depths to 40 metres (130 ft). Its length is up to 65 centimetres (26 in).

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

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The featured image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. Flocculent spirals -- galaxies without well-defined spiral arms -- are a quite common form of galaxy, and NGC 4414 is one of the closest. Stars and gas near the visible edge of spiral galaxies orbit the center so fast that the gravity from a large amount of unseen dark matter must be present to hold them together. Understanding the matter and dark matter distribution of NGC 4414 helps humanity calibrate the rest of the galaxy and, by deduction, flocculent spirals in general. Further, calibrating the distance to NGC 4414 helps humanity calibrate the cosmological distance scale of the entire visible universe.

Portrait of Billie Holiday and Mister, taken by William Gottlieb at the Downbeat Club, New York, 1947. Today, 110 years ago, she was born in Philadelphia.

William P. Gottlieb, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Booker T. Washington (1856 – 1915) was an American educator, author, and orator. He was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite between 1890 and 1915, playing a dominant role in black politics, winning wide support in the black community of the South and among more liberal whites. Washington was born into slavery in Hale's Ford, Virginia. He was freed when U.S. troops reached the area during the Civil War. In 1881, he was named as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an institute for black higher education. He expanded the college and enlisted students in construction of buildings. He attained national prominence for his Atlanta Exposition Address of 1895, which attracted the attention of politicians and the public. In 1901, Washington's published his autobiography, "Up from Slavery". Also in 1901, he became  the first black person publicly meeting the president on equal terms when he dined with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. 

Quote source: Up from Slavery: An Autobiography