Author Archives: Chompsky

Behold: two galaxies colliding, sixty million light-years away toward the southerly constellation Corvus. To wit:

The cosmic train wreck captured in stunning detail in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot takes hundreds of millions of years to play out. Cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, the galaxies’ individual stars don’t often collide though. Their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the wreckage. New star clusters and interstellar matter are jumbled and flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational forces. This Hubble close-up frame is about 50,000 light-years across at the estimated distance of the colliding galaxies. In wider-field views their suggestive visual appearance, with extended structures arcing for hundreds of thousands of light-years, gives the galaxy pair its popular name, The Antennae Galaxies.

(Image: ESA/Hubble NASA)

apod

Behold: the “Zip Fastener Ship’ a sleek silver vessel created in 2004 by Japanese artist Yasuhiro Suzuki parting the surface of Tokyo’s Sumida River. The launch, inspired by a view of the river from a plane flying overhead, has been an annual event since 2018. Suzuki sez of it:

The undertow of the boat, which travels back and forth between Azuma-bashi Bridge and Sakura-bashi Bridge, opened up the water like a zipper to connect the other side of the river. (I hoped) that it would change the way we look at the city landscape.

colossal

Behold: the spectacular result of a single exposure and a lot of careful planning. To wit:

The photographic goal was achieved by precise timing — needed for a nearly full moon to appear through the eye-shaped arch, by precise locating — needed for the angular size of the Moon to fit iconically inside the rock arch, and by good luck — needed for a clear sky and for the entire scheme to work. The seemingly coincidental juxtaposition was actually engineered with the help of three smartphone apps. The pictured sandstone arch, carved by erosion, is millions of years old and just one of thousands of natural rock arches that have been found in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, USA. Contrastingly, the pictured Moon can be found up in the sky from just about anywhere on Earth, about half the time.

(Image: Zachery Cooley)

apod

A short by Oscar-nominated Chinese animator Siqi Song centres around her family’s New Year’s Eve tradition and the comforting thought of home, when you’re far from it. To wit:

On Chinese New Year, finding the coin hidden in a dumpling (Jiaozi) brings good luck. A girl loses a jar on her journey to a new country, which contains the lucky coins she has been collecting growing up. Her new life begins with a search for the coin.

shortoftheweek