Astronomy Tuesday

Here's a lovely closeup of a spiral galaxy, courtesy of the Hubble.

NGC 7331 is similar to our Milky Way, so this is probably what the denizens of any of the billions of planets there see when they look in our direction. Wave to them!

Image Credit and License: ESA/Hubble and NASA/D. Milisavljevic (Purdue University)

Sunday bird blogging

He's not quite in the frame, but this grackle is too beautiful not to post.

I love those yellow eyes.

Saturday reflections

A fire escape on Columbus Avenue, reflected in a store window across the street.

Urban poetry

An underpass near the West Side Highway in New York -- one thing we never have a shortage of here is traffic.

Astronomy Tuesday

This is 3C 273, an object much more interesting than this Hubble image suggests.

Quasars (the name was originally derived from quasi-stellar radio source) were originally discovered in the 1950's when astronomers were using radio emissions as a new tool for investigating the universe. They found hundreds of objects that were emitting large amounts of radiation but either were invisible optically, or appeared as a very faint star.

When I was taking astronomy classes in college, quasars were still a mystery. The large redshift in the radiation they emitted suggested that they were very far away and moving very fast, maybe proto-galaxies at the very edge of the expanding universe.

Now more than 200,000 quasars have been identified, and we know that they consist of supermassive black holes surrounded by a disc of gas. As the gas falls into the black hole, enormous amounts of energy are released; the largest quasars are thousands of times more luminous than a galaxy like the Milky Way.

Finally, I have to admit that I am also old enough that I can't see the word quasar without thinking of the line of Motorola TV's by that name.

Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA

Welcome to the working week

New Year's morning in Times Square and all that pesky confetti to clean up.

I don't really have working weeks any more (hurray!) but I'm taking care of so much paperwork at the moment, plus planning upcoming trips, that it feels like a job. Though fortunately I don't have to write a report on my progress or sit through a meeting explaining what I'm doing instead of doing it.

Sunday bird blogging

I did much better in my visit to the park this week -- two usable pictures instead of one. But this female house finch is so pretty, I don't mind that she had so little company.

Saturday reflections

Walking on the Upper West Side on a sunny day this week, I caught these architectural reflections in a parked car.

Urban poetry

I loved these crooked tree trunks in St. John's.

Astronomy Tuesday

Layers of sedimentary rock in the Danielson Crater on Mars, as captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The bluish color is sand on the rocks.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Sunday bird blogging

These chipping sparrows came through last spring, but for some reason never graduated to the Ready to Post folders. I love when I manage to capture these glam shots, as though the birds were movie stars in the age of Technicolor posing for publicity shots.

I've acquired a new hair stylist, quite by accident. For years I had my hair cut by a woman down the street from my apartment; her haircuts are mediocre at best but she's very nice and I can pop in without an appointment while I'm out running errands. Then a few months ago, my friend Jayne was early for a lunch date and went for a haircut across the street from the restaurant where we were meeting. She loved the salon and the stylist, and after lunch I got my hair cut there as well.

I thought maybe it was a one-time fling, but I went back this week, and I'm afraid I belong to James now. I'm putting this story in bird blogging because I think of birds while he's cutting my hair -- his tiny scissors zip around my head and snip so delicately I feel like songbirds are flying through my hair. I'm always surprised to see the piles of hair on the floor because it feels as though he's barely touched me.

Of course, I'm going to have to move because I feel so guilty about abandoning my old stylist, and I can no longer walk past her salon. But that's a small price to pay for a good haircut.

Saturday reflections

Here's some more of that golden January light on the brick buildings reflected in the picture above.

I really wanted to post the image on the right. It's from the same building (on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea I think) but there's not really much of a reflection. So I just did both.

But I do love that bored security guard just pacing back and forth, back and forth.