I captured this image of the Croc’s Eye Galaxy (M94, also called the Cat’s Eye Galaxy) yesterday in my yard in Victoria, BC, using a total of 3 hours of exposure. It’s an unusual galaxy – it has a an inner ring with a diameter of 5,400 light-years and an outer one with a diameter of 45,000 light-years. Pressure from the galactic core compresses the gas and dust clouds in the outer ring, where gravity pulls them together to form new stars. These stars pull in more gas and dust, resulting in a relatively empty region separating them from yet another layer of gas at the periphery of the galaxy.
M94 has a remarkably low amount of dark matter for a galaxy – the stars comprise almost all of its mass. Their light travelled for 16 million years before reaching my telescope.
I’ve been postponing reading Asimov’s books, and this one demonstrated that I was wrong. It is a classic for a reason. Amazing prose and very cool characters.
Non-fiction:
“Fallen Leaves” by Will Durant (audio).
It’s interesting to listen to a personal opinion on the nature and meaning of life of a historian and philosopher written at the end of his long life, spent documenting experiences of other people. It is also curios that the manuscript of this book was actually lost and published only after Durant’s death. Also amazing how demonstrably misled even such educated and academically-minded person could be about topics that are only marginally beyond his field of study. I suppose, it’s an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
“How to Do the Work” by Dr. Nicole LePera (audio).
I liked the idea of interconnectedness of the psychological balance and physical wellness. One example that I particularly liked was on the undeniable effectiveness of placebo (as well as its opposite, the nocebo) in various medical trials. This book has about the maximum amount of woo-woo that I can tolerate without immediately becoming too skeptical to continue listening. What also helps is that the author has a traditional scientific background, which add certain structure to the presentation of the ideas.
“The Mountain is You” by Brianna Weist (audio).
I was a bit skeptical about this book because of a somewhat cheesy title, but I was pleasantly surprised. It is largely about the nature of self-sabotage and ways of avoiding it. One message that resonated particularly well was the necessity to normalize the new psychological state, e.g., feeling happy, in order to shift the baseline towards it. I will certainly consider Weist’s follow-up books as future reads.
“Make It Stick” by Peter C. Brown, Henry I. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel (audio).
I came across referenced to this book before, but this is the first time I listened to the entire thing. It was reviewed in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast that I sometimes listen to while walking the dog. It’s a very structured, for a popular science book, overview of study and teaching methodologies. The main takeaways for me were that Spacing and interleaving of practice constitute desirable difficulties. Also, tat generative self-quizzing is more effective than multiple-choice type or re-reading of the material.
“Born standing up” by Steve Martin (audio).
I heard about this autobiography any time in the podcasts that I follow, most notably “The Tim Ferris Show”, but finally I decided to listen to it. It’s an excellent book indeed. Very entertaining, insightful and inspiring. It is also another example of the benefit of the audio format, where the author and the reader is the same person. It also helps that he is a good actor.
“The Search” by Bruce Feiler (audio).
Some thoughts about the conventional concept of a career, and how outdate it is in the modern world. There is an attempt to hammer in this point with some statistics, but the rigor of the statistical analysis is a bit suspect, and I think the point is clear enough without all the surrounding fuss. The stories are entertaining, but there author is trying a bit too hard to deliver the point that diversity is paramount when considering the variety of jobs and occupations in the modern world.
“The Pivot Year” by Brianna Wiest (audio).
Well, Brianna Weist has certainly been the author of the year for me. I re-listened to “The Mountain is You” and liked this book too. It is clearly a compilation of blog posts, which is actually quite inspiring.
“Projections: A story of human emotions” by Karl Disseroth (audio).
My app shows that finished listening to this book to the end, but at the time of this writing, I have no recollection of what I learned from it. I should definitely be more diligent with taking notes, but it probably says something about the book too.
“The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin (audio).
This is excellent. I found this summary of thoughts about the creative process very relatable, despite the author’s background in music production, which is quite foreign to me.
“The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley (audio).
I remember that I enjoyed it, although struggle to recall what specifically I learned.
“10% Happier” by Dan Harris (audio).
That was a very nice read (listen). I enjoyed the overview of the author’s personal journey to “amateur buddhism”. It inspired me to read a couple more books on Buddhism immediately afterwards.
“Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness” by Mark Epstein, M.D. (audio).
The author was featured i “10% Happier” as Dan Harris’ mentor/teacher, so I decided to take a look (listen) at his work. It was quite nice. My favourite part is the anecdote about locking the keys in the car immediately after a mindfullness retreat and being Ok with it.
“Mindfulness: Six Guided Practices for Awakening” by Joseph Goldstein (audio).
This is another reference from “10% Happier”. For what it worth, my app shows that I abandoned it at 52%.
“Antifragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (audio).
A cool concept, but the author’s tangents about how amazing and non-conformist he is detracts from the experience quite a bit. If anything, it indirectly confirms the idea of the inherent value of formal education.
“Napoleon the Great” by Andrew Roberts (audio).
A biography of Napoleon. One of my favourite books this year.
W5 is a large emission nebula located in the Cassiopeia constellation, close to the Heart Nebula (IC 1805). There are several open star clusters inside the Soul Nebula, including IC 1848, which is often used to identify it.
The Soul Nebula is a star nursery, where new stars are created practically before our eyes. In fact, most stars have been born in regions like W5, where hundreds or thousands stars form at the same time.
The Soul spans 300 light-years, which is about 100 times the distance from the Sun to the nearest star.
About a dozen of giant O-type stars are primarily responsible for creating this emission nebula. These giant stars are approximately 30 times heavier and 10,000 times more luminous than our Sun. This intense luminocity is mostly in the form of ultraviolet radiation. It forms a powerful stellar wind that ionizes gas molecules and drives them away from the giant stars, creating the bubble structure in the middle of the nebula.
This structure contains gas pillars that point towards the stars that created them. The pillars form because the denser gas areas take longer to clear, while the material around them is swept away by the stellar wind. The compression of the gas molecules in the pillars accelerates their gravitational collapse and leads to formation of new stars.
In the Soul Nebula, there are at least three generations of star formation. Their light travelled for 6,500 years before reaching my camera in Victoria, BC in June of 2024.
IC 1805 is a faint, but huge emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation. It is about 330 light-years in diameter and has an angular size of 2 degrees – 4 diameters of the full Moon! The open star cluster in the centre of the heart (Collinder 26) creates intense stellar wind that drives the shape of the gas cloud and causes it to emit the intense red colour. Some of these stars are 50 times more massive than the Sun.
This light travelled for 7,500 years before reaching my camera in Victoria, BC in the early October.
M31 is the deep-sky object that made me want to do astrophography. This light travelled for 2.5 million years before reaching my yard in Victoria, BC in the early September.
The Andromeda is closest galaxy to our Milky Way Galaxy. It is 152,000 light-years in diameter, contains approximately 1 trillion stars and is moving towards us at 110 kilometres per second. Our galaxies will collide in about 4.5 billion years, eventually forming a single giant elliptical galaxy.
The chance of any stars colliding is actually negligibly small, because despite their great numbers, the distances between the stars are tremendous. The two galaxies will simply pass through each other, as they commonly do. In fact, the M31 itself merged with another galaxy 3 billion years ago.
However, both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centres, and when they eventually merge, they would form a quasar and release as much energy as about 100 million supernova explosions. According to the current models, there is a 12% chance that our Sun would get ejected from the new galaxy during the collision, in which case the star itself, as well as its planets would be undisturbed. However, if the Sun comes close to the new black hole, it would be torn apart by its gravity.
This will be of little consequence to the life on our planet, though, because much earlier than that, about 1 billion years from now, the Sun’s luminosity will increase by approximately 40%, and there will be no way for liquid water and terrestrial life to exist on Earth.
Time to introduce planetary engineering into our curriculum?
NGC 7635 is a unique-looking emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation. It looks like a glowing bubble, and in some sense it is. It’s a shell of ionized H II gas blown out by a massive, hot young star SAO 20575. This central star has a visual magnitude of 8.7 and has a mass of 44 Suns. Its light travelled for 11,000 years before it hit my yard in Victoria, BC on June 7, 2024.
Churaumi aquarium is famous for its scale and a large collection of animals. It is also controversial, basically for the same reasons. It is highly promoted as one of the top attractions in Okinawa, so we expected to see something grandiose. It actually blew the expectations away. Truly fascinating! For what it’s worth, I personally learned a lot. But I wouldn’t have believed that such incredible variety of species could coexist in such close proximity if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes just a day earlier while SCUBA diving at the local coral reefs (didn’t see a whale shark then, though).
Had a great day of SCUBA diving at the amazing Kerama Islands National park. The corals and the variety of brilliant marine life is the best I’ve seen. Thank you, Dorka, for guiding us on this amazing adventure!
This shrine was established at the base of the Hakusan mountain over 2,100 years ago! Hakusan, which stands over three prefectures (Ishikawa, Fukui and Gifu), has been considered a sacred mountain since ancient times, being an important water source for the valleys below. The deity of the shrine is a goddess of matchmaking and family happiness.
Hakusan Hime jinjya has an incredibly tranquil atmosphere – a cool, quiet forest full of the sound of running streams. The 800-years-old sugi cedar, a sacred tree, that stands at the omote-sando walkway is 12 meters in circumpherence at the base and is 45-meters tall! I’ve see several trees during this trip to Japan that reminded me of Studio Ghibli’s “My neighbour Totoro,” and this is one of them.
We were lucky to enjoy some golden light when we came up to the main shrine. The building is both grandiose and elegant at the same time. And the shimenawa rope, which is meant to ward off evil spirits, over the entrance is some of the most impressively thick I’ve seen.
Our daughter, for whom this the first visit to Japan, was soaking up the incredible surroundings and enjoying learning the etiquette of visiting a shrine: make an offering of money, bow twice, clap twice, bow once. When leaving, turn around and bow again.
Kotoji lantern at Kenrokuen garden. This iconic symbol of Kanazawa resembles a bridge on a koto – a traditional Japanese string instrument. It is different from other Japanese lanterns, because it has two pedestals of uneven length – one on the ground and one in the water. Their beautiful curves give the lantern its unique shape, and they are quite difficult to capture precisely in a sketch.
