Che Guevara In The Former Fields Of The Villareal Golf Club- Colinas Del Villareal, Loma De Bacuranao,

Huế, Vietnam. Credit to Dong Ho Vy.

Stained glass |  Colored light by Michel Carlué

Cathedral of Lausanne, Switzerland. Personal photos.

The Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is nearly 200,000 light years from earth. The picture above shows how it consists of vast clouds of dust and gas most likely from old stars going supernova. It is a stellar nursery for stars, similar to a nebula.

Close to this is the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and it is largely believed that their irregular shape is due to a collision that occurred between them thousands of years ago.

A prominent feature of the LMC is the Tarantula nebula (which the James Webb telescope recently took a high res photo of).

Sadly, those in the Northern Hemisphere never get the chance to see the LMC - it is only visible in the Southern Hemisphere!

the smell of old books

Telescope Dome, Mt. Wilson Observatory, Angeles National Forest, California, 2023.

The beginnings of "big science" and the evolution of astronomy as more than speculative star gazing are both encapsulated in this structure. Its telescopes are now obsolete for most kinds of optical observations in the visible spectrum as larger mirrors and locations far from urban light pollution make other observatories more useful for those. Mt. Wilson Observatory is still used for some other types of astronomical explorations. Amazing that only a little more than a century old, the observatory saw the known universe expand from a single galaxy to one of countless galaxies spread over billions of light years even as the number of planets known to orbit around stars has grown exponentially. Mt. Wilson's telescopes and the early astronomers who worked there laid the groundwork for all of the magnificent facilities now available to astronomy and astrophysics and for the discoveries they are making. Not least of those is the Webb Telescope in space 1.5 million + km from earth.