True Love is Born from Understanding

Postcard CZ-561866 from Czech shows "Buddha Moon" produced by Tushita, a Germany based calendar and card publishers of ethnic and spiritual editions in the last 30 years, as a Sangha Edition. In Buddhism, Sangha (僧伽) means the monastic community of ordained Buddhist monks or nuns.

At the beginning of the New Year, I found one of the Budda quotes especially telling: "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth."

North Cape, Norway

Postcard NO-102992 from Norway shows North Cape (Nordkapp in Norwegian), located on the northern coast of the island of Magerøya in Northern Norway and shown as a red pin in the following map. It is often mistakenly regarded as the northernmost point of Europe.

However, the neighboring Knivskjellodden point, shown as a green pin on the map below, is 1,457 meters or 4,780 feet farther to the north, which is sometimes considered the northernmost point of the entire continent of Europe.

Nonetheless, both of above points are located on an island. Cape Nordkinn (Kinnarodden in Norwegian), located on the Nordkinn Peninsula and shown as a yellow pin on the map, is the northernmost point of mainland Europe.

Regardless, North Cape is a popular tourist attraction with a 307-meter or 1,007-foot high cliff where visitors can watch the midnight sun or the panoramic views of the Barents Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean, to the north on a large flat plateau. The midnight sun can be seen from May 14 to the July 31 during which the sun reaches its lowest point above the horizon from 12:14 to 12:24 a.m.

Previously, I have featured the north cape in New Zealand in this blog.

If Comet Has a Choice

Comet is in the news as the European Space Agency's spacecraft made a first ever soft landing on a comet after a 10-year, 310-million-mile or 500-million-kilometer journey. However, the mission may have ended early as the spacecraft apparently bounced and landed in a shadow and could not get enough charge to its batteries from solar panels.

A comet is basically a big dirty snow ball that circles the Sun. When getting close to the Sun, it gets heated up and begins to emit gas and particles from its nucleus, forming a visible atmosphere, and sometimes a tail upon the effects of solar radiation and solar wind.

Comets become extinct when they have lost all of their volatile ices and particles as a result of having passed too close to the Sun, or having passed close to the Sun too many times. So, I am wondering if a comet has a choice, will she choose to stay away from the Sun and live as a dirty snow ball eternally, or to get close to the Sun and reveal herself in splendid once and for all?

Postcard US-2107408 to Russia was made from a photo I collected when I was in graduate school. Google Image Search turns up several additional photos at Sunet.SE's ftp site. It looks like to be Comet Hale–Bopp that had its closest approach to Earth on March 22, 1997.

Blood Moon in Sky

Postcard US-1651277 to Russia shows various nightlife in Florida under a "blood moon".

In the early morning of April 15, 2014 when a total lunar eclipse occurred, the "blood moon" was visible from most of North and South America, Hawaii and parts of Alaska. A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon, the earth, and the sun are in alignment. As a result, the moon is completely covered by the Earth’s shadow. The following photo shows the total eclipse of the moon underway over Las Vegas, Nevada as seen from West Sahara Avenue and South Valley View Boulevard around 12:40 am on April 15, 2014. The bright star on the lower-right corner is Spica from the constellation Virgo, the 15th brightest star in the sky.

The eclipse was the first of four consecutive total lunar eclipses, known as a tetrad, on April, 15, 2014, October 8, 2014, April 4, 2015, and September 28 2015.

Image Schématique du Soleil

Schematic Image of the Sun and its Environment

This postcard from my space related collection shows the schematic image of the Sun and its environment. It provides a blue print showing the wide range of phenomena studied by the various experiments on board the spacecraft Ulysses.

Ulysses, decommissioned on June 30, 2009, was a joint robotic space probe to study the Sun by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The launch of Ulysses was delayed until October 6, 1990 aboard Discovery (mission STS-41) due to the loss of its initially assigned carrier Challenger. It studied the Sun at all latitudes, breaking the limitation that the Sun had been only observed from low solar latitudes due to the Earth's orbit confined on the ecliptic plane. The mission was managed by JPL.