Hubble — Poem in Pleiades Form

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.

Hubble

Hazy tidal bridge with
hot and bright newborn stars
has lopsided structure
highly warped from the plane.
How this spiral pattern
hauls swaths of blue-jewel stars
hitched to galactic disks.

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Hear this on Sound Cloud

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Written for:

MeetingTheBar: Pleiades

Today, Vandana Sharma prompts us to write a Pleiades Form Poem. This consists of seven lines, each line starting with the same letter as the title. The title is a single word. Preferably it should be about space, which is NO PROBLEM for me.

Image credits: NASA Rose of Galaxies

Sonnet XXXV

Newly Discovered Supernova in the Whirlpool Galaxy

A superstar stellar celebrity
has appeared in the evening sky. Among
the worldwide observing community,
no one ever saw a starburst this young.
The inner clockwork of this titanic
event, was ranked as a universal
episode of intensity. Cosmic
explosions were seen by professional
digital astroimagers. They prepared
very large aperture telescopes,
then witnessed what the precursor star dared
to do before bursting. Everyone hopes
to glimpse the event with reinforced eyes:
that brilliant whirlpool that lives in dark skies.

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Open Link Night ~ Week 34

This is a hubble space telescope picture. It’s just gorgeous.

Sonnet XXXIV

Ancient Supernova Spits Gamma Ray Fire

Ionic currents light the nebula.
Most lustrous waves of fury in the sky,
growing remains of a supernova.
Super-charged neutron-star. Pulsar. Whereby,
feint gamma rays in a smoky curtain
flash actively in a magnetized state.
Chemiluminescent radiation
blasting ions at a powerful rate.
The most powerful particle sources,
a luminal heart of a shattered star,
spins and lights up stellar resources
in a dragon galaxy spitting fire.
Across the electromagnetic field,
enormous flares are splendidly revealed.

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This comes from

http://www.space.com/11640-ancient-supernova-spits-gamma-ray-fire.html

I don’t have much to say about this. I liked the picture, and I loved the title, thought it was poetic, so I wrote this sonnet.

Sonnet XXXI

Oddly Off-Kilter NGC 2442

Even a galaxy may be off kilter ―
not shaped like a pristine bilateral
spiral. Light streaks outward through a filter,
it seems, when snatched by a collateral
body. Free-floating hydrogen was drawn
into tangible streamer vanes of gas;
dust yanked like taffy, with endless brawn,
from the main arm. Clusters of stars surpass
a single bright light in beauty, but can’t
match up to a more exquisite rival,
like Andromeda or Whirlpool; the scant
are ripped by those larger and more frightful.
Cosmic layouts shaped like feathers and tails:
mind-numbing forces, energies and scales.

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This comes from “The delicate aftermath of cosmic violence” , on @badastronomer’s Discover Magazine blog.

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Open Link Night, Week 25