Windmills of your Mind

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While reading a post reblogged by bearspawprint entitled unique nature landscapes: moonlit kingdom by eyes of odysseus, I was reminded of the awesome picture above I had come across on Star Walk for iPad: Star trails in the southern hemisphere taken by Sebastian Voltmer.

By now the cogs of my mind were locking into place as I remembered the lyrics for Windmills of your Mind, a favourite of mine from my childhood:

Round
like a circle in a spiral
like a wheel within a wheel
never ending or beginning
on an ever spinning reel
like a snowball down a mountain
or a carnival balloon
like a carousel that’s turning
running rings around the moon

like a clock whose hands are sweeping
past the minutes of its face
and the world is like an apple
whirling silently in space
like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind!

like a tunnel that you follow
to a tunnel of its own
down a hollow to a cavern
where the sun has never shone,
like a door that keeps revolving
in a half forgotten dream,
or the ripples from a pebble
someone tosses in a stream

like a clock whose hands are sweeping …

keys that jingle in your pocket
words that jangle in your head
why did summer go so quickly?
was it something that you said?
lovers walk along a shore
and leave their footprints in the sand

is the sound of distant drumming
just the fingers of your hand?
pictures hanging in a hallway
and the fragment of this song
half remembered names and faces
but to whom do they belong?

he: when you knew
that it was over
you were suddenly aware
that the autumn leaves were turning
to the color
of her hair!

she: when you knew
that it was over
in the autumn of goodbyes
for a moment
you could not recall the color
of his eyes!

like a circle in a spiral
like a wheel within a wheel
never ending or beginning
on an ever spinning reel

as the images unwind
like the circles
that you find
in the windmills of your mind!

Songwriters: / Bergman, Alan / Bergman, Marilyn
The Windmills Of Your Mind lyrics © EMI Music Publishing

Astral Catherine Wheel

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Looking like a spider’s web swirled into a spiral, the galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, the faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy’s disk.

At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galaxy standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. It belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2.

IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way.

New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy clip. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation.

Data from Spitzer’s infrared array camera (IRAC) are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns).

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. Star Walk app for iPad – European Space Agency

Angel gliding across the sky

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The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is having a “shocking” effect on the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Stellar winds flowing out from this fast-moving star are making ripples in the dust as it approaches, creating a bow shock seen as glowing gossamer threads, which, for this star, are only seen in infrared light.

Zeta Ophiuchi is a young, large and hot star located around 370 light-years away. It dwarfs our own sun in many ways — it is about six times hotter, eight times wider, 20 times more massive, and about 80,000 times as bright. Even at its great distance, it would be one of the brightest stars in the sky were it not largely obscured by foreground dust clouds.

This massive star is travelling at a snappy pace of about 54,000 mph (24 kilometers per second), fast enough to break the sound barrier in the surrounding interstellar material. Because of this motion, it creates a spectacular bow shock ahead of its direction of travel (to the left). The structure is analogous to the ripples that precede the bow of a ship as it moves through the water, or the sonic boom of an airplane hitting supersonic speeds.

The fine filaments of dust surrounding the star glow primarily at shorter infrared wavelengths, rendered here in green. The area of the shock pops out dramatically at longer infrared wavelengths, creating the red highlights.

A bright bow shock like this would normally be seen in visible light as well, but because it is hidden behind a curtain of dust, only the longer infrared wavelengths of light seen by Spitzer can reach us.

Bow shocks are commonly seen when two different regions of gas and dust slam into one another. Zeta Ophiuchi, like other massive stars, generates a strong wind of hot gas particles flowing out from its surface. This expanding wind collides with the tenuous clouds of interstellar gas and dust about half a light-year away from the star, which is almost 800 times the distance from the sun to Pluto. The speed of the winds added to the star’s supersonic motion result in the spectacular collision seen here.

Our own sun has significantly weaker solar winds and is passing much more slowly through our galactic neighborhood so it may not have a bow shock at all. NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft are headed away from the solar system and are currently about three times farther out than Pluto. They will likely pass beyond the influence of the sun into interstellar space in the next few years, though this is a much gentler transition than that seen around Zeta Ophiuchi.

For this Spitzer image, infrared light at wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns is rendered in blue, 8.0 microns in green, and 24 microns in red.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Posted from European Space Agency Star Walk app for iPad