Beautifully illustrated poems celebrating Space and Science - Joanna Tilsley

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science.

A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz, the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology.

In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo, an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month.

Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London.

Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.

 I had been reading a lot about cosmology and new physics at the time, and as I took my habitual walks across the marshes surrounding my home in North London, I pondered deeply upon the dimensions of space and time through which I was passing, as well as existing euphorically in the moment with the first stirrings of spring. 

The poems followed naturally through; in fact they burst out of me, allowing me to weave a pattern of deep emotion through a weft of scientific fact.

Read more here

Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park

Astro-photographer Captures Beautiful Image of Horsehead Nebula

Astro-photographer Terry Hancock took this image of the Horsehead Nebula from DownUnder Observatory in Fremont, Mich., US.

Credit: Terry Hancock

Video: Beautiful Ontario Lacus

Video: See Beautiful Ontario Lacus - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory



NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

NASA WiSE Vision: The Magnificent and Beautiful Andromeda Galaxy

The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 or simply M31, is captured in full in this new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The mosaic covers an area equivalent to more than 100 full moons, or five degrees across the sky.

WISE used all four of its infrared detectors to capture this picture (3.4- and 4.6-micron light is colored blue; 12-micron light is green; and 22-micron light is red). Blue highlights mature stars, while yellow and red show dust heated by newborn, massive stars.

Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, and is located 2.5 million light-years from our sun. It is close enough for telescopes to spy the details of its ringed arms of new stars and hazy blue backbone of older stars.

Also seen in the mosaic are two satellite galaxies, known as M32, located just a bit above Andromeda to the left of center, and the fuzzy blue M110, located below the center of the great spiral arms. These satellites are the largest of several that are gravitationally bound to Andromeda.

The Andromeda galaxy is larger than our Milky Way and contains more stars, but the Milky Way is thought to perhaps have more mass due to its larger proportion of a mysterious substance called dark matter.

Both galaxies belong to our so-called Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies, most of which are tiny dwarf systems. In its quest to map the whole sky, WISE will capture the entire Local Group.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

ESA ENVISAT Symposium: Beautiful Norway

Under the sea in Norway
Hardangerjøkulen, the sixth largest glacier in mainland Norway, is located to the east of the most northern inland branch of the Hardangerfjord.

It served as the ice planet Hoth in the 1980 movie Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

With its long coastline and pristine fjords, Norway enjoys good conditions for raising fish stocks. Today, some 800 fish farms dot its coastline, and fish is the third most important export product after oil/gas and metal.

In terms of Atlantic salmon, Norway is the leading fish farming country in the world.

North of Hardangerfjord is the city of Bergen, which will host ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, from 28 June – 2 July 2010.

Nearly 1000 scientific researchers and data users are expected to attend the symposium, previously named the Envisat Symposium, where they will present results and compare findings of ongoing research activities using data from ESA’s Envisat, ERS-2, Earth Explorers and Third Party Mission satellites.

This image was acquired by Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on 9 February 2010, working in Full Resolution mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m.

ESA ENVISAT: Beautiful Norway from space

This Envisat image features a snow-flanked western Norway, located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in northern Europe.

Norway, Europe's northernmost country, is famed for its fjords – long narrow arms of the sea that commonly extend far inland.

Some of these are visible at the left edge of the land as dark lines between the white and snow-covered land.

During the ice age both ice and rivers carved deep valleys in the mountains.

As the climate changed, most of the ice melted, and the valleys were gradually filled with salt water from the coast, giving birth to the fjords.

Many fjords are astoundingly deep, reaching hundreds to thousands of metres below sea level.

The Sognefjord (image centre) is Norway's longest and deepest fjord, stretching 205 km inland and reaching a maximum depth of 1308 m below sea level.

The average width of the main branch of the fjord is about four-and-a-half km. The only fjord larger than Sognefjord in the world is the Scoresby Sund in Greenland.

South of Sognefjord is the Hardangerfjord, Norway’s second largest and the world’s third largest. It is about 179 km long and has a maximum depth of more than 800 m.

Not all of the ice melted when the climate began to change, so parts of the mountain areas remained covered with ice, creating glaciers. Glaciers cover more than 2600 sq km of Norway’s land area.

The largest glacier in Northern Europe, the Jostedalsbreen, is situated north of the Sognefjord’s inland branches.

Read the full article here ....

A beautiful Storm passes by