Monthly Explorations. January 2010

Every month MSNBC Technology & Science puts together a slideshow collection of the month's most stupefyingly beautiful photographs taken of space. This one might be my favorite: Saturn and its immensity dwarfing Rhea, one if its uncanny sixty-one moons. The shadow of another moon is visible to the bottom left of Saturn's ring at the edge of the planet's disk, a small dark dot. 

This too: a painfully detailed and intense image of the Tarantula Nebula, the largest stellar nursery considered to be part of our "local neighborhood" of galaxies. The Tarantula Nebula has such magnitude and ferocious luminosity that if it were any closer to us--as close as, say, the Orion Nebula--the nebula would indeed cast canvassing shadows down on Earth. Contained within this nebula (those blue sparkles) is a star cluster, the most massive of which have already long since exploded. Taken here is arguably the most detailed image ever of Tarantula.

And for a quick rundown of recent news: Obama's budget dastardly crosses off any hopes for near-future trips to the moon, giving Russia and India the go-ahead as we direct our focus elsewhere despite the sizable chunks of money already spent in Bush's ill-conceived 2020 return to the moon plan; dinosaurs (yet again boosting dino to bird linkage) had slight red plumage; nuclear fusion is looking more and more possible; and I for one don't give a damn about an iPad or any further extraneous developments in too much technology. Go for a walk, people. And to quote the Jack Forkheimer, "keep looking up."