Search This Blog

Monday, December 13, 2010

A Dazzling Planetary Nebula - Hafiz, Sagan, Van Gogh, George Polya, Laozi, Thich Nhat Hanh, & William Shakespeare





Human Beings, indeed all sentient beings, have the right to pursue happiness and live in peace and freedom.

- The XIVth Dalai Lama



http://twitter.com/peacequotes



Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

- Samuel Beckett



http://themodernword.com



I have learned that every heart will get what it prays for most.

- Hafiz



What you think, you create. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you become.

- Adele Basheer



Promise me you'll always remember: you're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, & smarter than you think.

- Christopher to Pooh



Nothing happens unless first we dream.

- Carl Sandburg



My understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe did not come out of my rational mind.

- Albert Einstein



Self-respect is often mistaken for arrogance when in reality it is the opposite. When we can recognize all our good qualities as well as or faults with neutrality, we can start to appreciate ourselves as we would a dear friend and experience the comfortable inner glow of respect. To embrace the journey towards our full potential we need to become our own loving teacher and coach. Spurring ourselves on to become better human beings we develop true regard for ourselves and our life will become sacred.

- Osho



The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

- Bertrand Russel



There is no time left for anything but to make peacework a dimension of our every waking activity.

- Elise Boulding



Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

- Adlai E. Stevenson



There is no model; there is only color.

- Paul Cezanne



Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage.



Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

- Mevlana Rumi



What we are is God's Gift to us; What we become is our Gift to God.

- Eleanor Powell



Everybody wants to eat at the government's table, but nobody wants to do the dishes.

- Werner Finck



All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind.

- Eckhart Tolle



People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results. - Albert Einstein



Let him that would move the world first move himself.

- Socrates



Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

- Deepak Chopra



There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton



Treasure each empty moment of the experience. Something sacred is about to be born!

- Osho



Nothing happens unless first we dream.

- Carl Sandburg



There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, "Truth is the daughter of Time."

- Abraham Lincoln



Be kind to unkind people - they need it the most.

- Ashleigh Brilliant



When you blame others, you give up your power to change.

- Douglas Noel Adams



Where there is great love, there are always miracles.

- Willa Cather



What you seek is seeking you!

- Mevlana Rumi



Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived.

- Eleanor Roosevelt



The owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

- George Carlin



There are three truths: my truth, your truth and the truth.

- Chinese Proverb



‎Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

- Vincent Van Gogh



Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

- Albert Einstein



How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway... And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!

- Anne Frank



We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race.

- Kofi Annan (Elected Secretary General of the United Nations on December 13, 1996)



Where they burn books, they will also burn people.



Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.

- Heinrich Heine (Born December 13, 1797)



Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry... To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.



The best of ideas is hurt by uncritical acceptance and thrives on critical examination.

- George Pรณlya (Born December 3, 1187)



http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/December#13















































The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.



The Tao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds.



The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.



A leader is best when people barely know that he exists...



Since before time and space were, the Tao is. It is beyond is and is not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.



A good traveler has no fixed plans

and is not intent upon arriving.

A good artist lets his intuition

lead him wherever it wants.



Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.



A journey of a thousand li starts with a single step.



The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas. Tolerant like the sky, all-pervading like sunlight, firm like a mountain, supple like a tree in the wind, he has no destination in view and makes use of anything life happens to bring his way.



The Master has no possessions.

The more he does for others, the happier he is.

The more he gives to others, the wealthier he is.



The Tao nourishes by not forcing.

By not dominating, the Master leads.

- Laozi, Tao Te Ching



http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Laozi



Hope isn't obvious or easy. It takes a stubborn resolve & an indomitable will. With hope, no matter how dark the day, there is always light.

- Cory Booker







From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.



The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.



Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.



The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.



It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot







The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.



Peace is every step.

- Thich Nhat Hanh



How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.

- William Shakespeare







I am a passenger on Spaceship Earth.

- Buckminster Fuller







"Explanation: Have you contemplated your sky recently? Tonight will be a good one for midnight meditators at many northerly locations as meteors from the Geminids meteor shower will frequently streak through. The Geminds meteor shower has slowly been building to a crescendo and should peak tonight. Pictured above ten days ago, a group of celestial sightseers in the Maranjab Desert in Iran, were treated to a dark and wondrous pre-dawn sky that contained the planet Venus and a crescent Moon. Tonight Mars and Mercury should be visible just above the southwestern horizon at sunset, while the first quarter Moon will set around midnight."

Amplify’d from www.spacetelescope.org

A Dazzling Planetary Nebula

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has turned its eagle eye to the planetary nebula NGC 6572, a very bright example of these strange but beautiful objects. Planetary nebulae are created during the late stages of the evolution of certain stars that eject gas into space and emit intense ultraviolet radiation that makes the material glow. This picture of NGC 6572 shows the intricate shapes that can develop as stars exhale their last breaths. Hubble has even imaged the central white dwarf star, the origin of the dazzling nebula, but now a faint, but hot, vestige of its former glory.

NGC 6572 only began to shed its gases a few thousand years ago, so it is a fairly young planetary nebula. As a result the material is still quite concentrated, which explains why it is abnormally bright. The envelope of gas is currently racing out into space at a speed of around 15 kilometres every second and as it becomes more diffuse, it will dim.

NGC 6572 was discovered in 1825 by the German astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, who came from a family of distinguished stargazers. The name planetary nebula is left over from the time when the telescopes of early astronomers were not good enough to reveal the true nature of these objects. To many, the discs looked like the outer planets Uranus and Neptune. The application of spectral analysis, later in the 19th century, first revealed that they were glowing gas clouds.

NGC 6572 is magnitude 8.1, easily bright enough to make it an appealing target for amateur astronomers with telescopes. It is located within the large constellation of Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer) and at low magnification it will appear to be just a coloured star, but higher magnification will reveal its shape. Some observers report that NGC 6572 looks blue, while others state that it is green. Colour as seen through the eyepiece is often a matter of interpretation, so you may make your own decision!

This picture was created from images taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 2. Images through a blue filter that isolates the glow from hydrogen gas (Hβ, F487N, coloured dark blue), a green filter that isolates emission from ionised oxygen (F502N, coloured blue), a yellow broadband filter (F555W, coloured green) and a red filter that passes emission from hydrogen (Hα, F656N) have been combined. The exposure times were 360 s, 240 s, 100 s and 180 s, respectively and the field of view is just 29 arcseconds across.

Credit:

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Read more at www.spacetelescope.org
 

No comments:

Post a Comment