The wonder and mystery of it all.......

 

description and enlargeable photo here

rare fabric....................

 

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

-Anatole France

enlargeable image, with description, via

Watching, always watching......................

 

        back story and enlargeable photo here

borrowing........................

We borrow our atoms.
The universe owns them.

The universe borrows our love and wonder.
Those belong to us.

-Jarod K. Anderson

photo via

A coming attraction.......................

 ..................Lots of hype in our part of the world about the coming (April 8th) total solar eclipse.  One of my favorite memories about total solar eclipses was my junior high school reading of Mark Twain's tale, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, wherein our hero, Hank Morgan, outwits Merlin and King Arthur.

image via

Witness.................

 

 The universe is an event, not a place.
 Don't seek to own.
 Witness.

-Jarod K. Anderson

image via

I still say they are just guessing............

 Explanation: Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years for the most massive stars, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew. The expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. Light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A.

-via the APOD site

Visiting the Astronomy Picture of the Day site........

 ........................will cure you of thinking you've got it all figured out.  Enjoy.

Knowledge.........

 

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

-attributed to Carl Sagan

photo via

Orion and the Running Man...............

 -back story and enlargeable photo here

Surfing...................

 .............................................the APOD site:

Content...........................

 I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation.  We are complex enough, interesting enough.  What we have learned, limited as we must assume it to be, is wonderful even in the fact of its limitations.

-Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness Of Things

image via

Celestial.............................

 ...................................Pac-man?

    back story and enlargeable photo here

There's a lot going on out there..........

 Merging galaxies via APOD and Webb's camera:

remember........................

 It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception is composed of others.

-attributed to John Holmes

image via APOD

Explain to me again...........

.....................how much we are really capable of knowing, and understanding, all of this:

Strive....................

 

'We must strive to be like the moon.' An old man in Kabati repeated this sentence often... the adage served to remind people to always be on their best behavior and to be good to others. He said that people complain when there is too much sun and it gets unbearably hot, and also when it rains too much or when it is cold. But, no one grumbles when the moon shines. Everyone becomes happy and appreciates the moon in their own special way. Children watch their shadows and play in its light, people gather at the square to tell stories and dance through the night. A lot of happy things happen when the moon shines. These are some of the reasons why we should want to be like the moon.

-Ishmael Beah

image via

Crashing...................

 ......in slow motion.  In a billion years or so, our quiet little galaxy might be involved in a major collision.  Is it too soon to worry? What do the computer models say?  Back story and enlargeable photo are here:

Meanwhile....................................

 ...........38 million light years distant.  The mind reels.

photo copyright: Mark Hanson and Mike Selby.  Enlargeable photo and explanation of Messier 96 may be found here.

Blowing bubbles................

 Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and some 45-times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie a mere 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously acquired Hubble Space Telescope image data.

-as cut and pasted from APOD