Bodrum, Turkey

Postcard TR-220335 from Turkey shows multiple views of Bodrum, a port city with 36,317 residents as of 1012 in Muğla Province, Turkey. Located on the southern coast of Bodrum Peninsula, the city was known as Halicarnassus of Caria in ancient times and was famous for the Mausoleum of Mausolus, a tomb built between 353 and 350 B.C.E. for Mausolus, a governor in the Persian Empire.

Bodrum Castle, built by the Knights of St John of Rhodes in the 15th century who had used the stones from the tomb to reinforce the castle walls where sections of polished marble from the tomb are still visible today. As seen on the card, the castle overlooks the harbor and the marina, with the Museum of Underwater Archeology on its ground.

News on Saturn

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. In 1980 and 1981, the Voyager space probes flew by Saturn and measured a day on Saturn as 10 hours and 39 minutes. They also returned the first high resolution images, which revealed a persisting hexagonal wave pattern around the north polar vortex in the atmosphere among other discoveries. The Cassini–Huygens spacecraft arrived in 2004, found the days a little bit longer at 10 hours and 47 minutes. However, a team of planetary scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel recently reported in Nature that the spin period is 10 hours and 32 minutes and 45 seconds plus or minus 46 seconds for Saturn when the spin was deduced from its gravity field. Their model removed the distortion of the previously measured gravity field that caused the equator of Saturn bulging outward due to Saturn's fast rotations.

Unrelated, NASA is planning a mission to Saturn to explore one of its 61 moons known as Titan. Titan, twice the size of the Earth's moon, is the only moon of Saturn that has an atmosphere. Because the majority of the moon is dominated by methane and ethane lakes in liquid form,  NASA has designed a new submarine that can be operated at -290°F or -179°C  to study the Kraken Mare, the biggest sea on what is Saturn’s biggest moon, at a maximum speed of  2 miles or 3.2 km per hour for a duration of three months.

Postcard US-1575782 from the U.S. was a multi-view card showing the satellites of Saturn.

Scotland Voted to Stay in U.K.

People in Scotland voted 55 percent to 45 percent to remain part of the United Kingdom, against independence in a historic referendum on Thursday September 18, 2014, with an unprecedented over-85 percent turnout.

The result kept a 307-year union with England in place, bringing a huge sigh of relief to the British political establishment by ending the prospect of losing a substantial part of its territory, oil reserves and international influence.

Postcard GB-497558 shows multiple views of South Queensferry, a town to the west of Edinburgh, Scotland, with a population of  9,026 in 2011. The sender was originally from Scotland, but now lives just north of London in England.

Antalya, Turkey

Postcard TR-195334 from Turkey shows multiple views of Antalya, a city on the Mediterranean coast of southwestern Turkey on the Asia side with a population of 964,886 in 2011. As Turkey's largest sea resort town, Antalya was the third most visited city, behind Paris and London, in the world in 2013 in terms of the number of international arrivals. Major attractions include Düden Waterfalls and Yivliminare Mosque, as shown on the card.

California Wind Energy

Postcard US-2822274 from California is a multi-view card that shows wind farms in California. The description on the card reads "California contains the world's largest concentration of wind turbines. Every year the 15,000 wind turbines in the Altamont, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio Passes produce enough electricity to meet the residential needs of a city the size of San Francisco. And they do so without producing any air pollution or contributing to global warming. California's use of wind energy has become a model for counties around the world." Photo credits by Lloyd Herziger and Ed Linton.

Retracing the Footsteps: 50 Years Later.

This is one of the dozen postcards I sent off today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. I used a newly issued "1963 Match on Washington" stamp to replace one view on a multiview card, then drop it off with others at a post office for hand cancellation before I headed to the March.

Tens of thousands people celebrated the anniversary by retracing the 1.7 mile historical march during the on-again off-again rain at 9 am. It started at the Georgetown University Law Center and ended at the Lincoln Memorial.

Four Seasons in Japan

I received this thank-you card from Japan for one of my official PostCrossing card. It shows four major landmarks in Japan in four seasons.

Top-left shows the Kinkaku-ji Temple in winter; top-right is the Himeji-jo Castle in spring. Sunset at the Toji-no-toh Pagoda  shows on the lower-left; the famous Mt. Fuji and Kawaguchi-ko Lake in the fall is on the lower-right.