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

foam

Carina Nebula – from Hubble

canned cream
at your mouth
in your face

fall flat air bubble fairies
toothlessly smiling
with balding hair
of baby similitude
like bellwort slobber
sputtering radioactive blood

cold,  solid steam
carbonated, chlorinated
fumigated, undulated
meta foam
like carpal fountains
of spread fingers

certified, personified,
versified foam
cools rage
quenches nightmares

smokeless frosting
delivered by messenger service
soothing, illimitable
universal soup of life

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Hear this on chirbit

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Written for:

Meeting the Bar: Impressionistic writing

Image Credit:NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

Sonnet 42

Black hole shreds star, sparking gamma ray flash

Sonnet XLII

The black hole’s great singularity tow
draws everything into its gravity
cauldron. Pay close attention to it grow.
Since collapsing vigorous cavity
is so different from any explosive,
yet cosmic event that’s been seen before,
annihilation will seem corrosive.
Detectives troll the universe for more
gamma ray bursts. All of the light is sucked
in its massive gravitational pull.
A tidal disruption, an implied duct,
insatiable, and never to get full.
Galaxies harbor black holes in their heart
where mid-sized stars existed at its start.

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Hear this on chirbit

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Posted for:

OpenLinkNight ~ Week 55

Photo credit:  NASA handout illustration of a growing supermassive black hole

Sonnet XXXIX

Galactic bubble with an embryonic star least 8 times the mass of the Sun nestled in its shell. This star could one day be one of the brightest in the galaxy.

Calculating the probabilities
that our world is constructed uniquely ―
intoxicating possibilities
that others will cross our way obliquely.
Let’s ponder how life might exist elsewhere,
it’s sensible! Where are the right pools
for life to begin, so temperate and fair?
Astrobiologists do not have those rules
to explain the riddles of creation,
or the imprint of initial cosmos.
Astronauts query, in the space station:
they study the origins of homos.
The knowledge they uncover is sublime,
to feed dreams we will share for all of time.

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Photo credit:  European Space Agency

Opportunity on Mars

Metal on the Plains of Mars

scouting fallen parts

some are mine and some are not

Mars – my only home

garbage strewn throughout the land

metals of the gods and man

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This waka was posted for The Purple Treehouse  the “assignment” was to write a WAKA, which is a form of classical Japanese verse that ends up being 5-7-5-7-7. Go to the link to find out more about it, if so it should please you.

Also posted on:

Open Link Night ~ Week 38

The picture comes from:  http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110731.html

The image credit is Mars Exploration Rover at JPL

This is a very interesting picture. I am copying the explnation from the Astronomy Picture of the Day page:

Explanation: What has the Opportunity rover found on Mars? While traversing a vast empty plain in 2005 in Meridiani Planum, one of Earth’s rolling robots on Mars found a surprise when visiting the location of its own metallic heat shield discarded last year during descent. The surprise is the rock visible on the lower left, found to be made mostly of dense metals iron and nickel. The large cone-shaped object behind it — and the flank piece on the right — are parts of Opportunity’s jettisoned heat shield. Smaller shield debris is also visible. Scientists do not think that the basketball-sized metal “Heat Shield Rock” originated on Mars, but rather is likely an ancient metallic meteorite. In hindsight, finding a meteorite in a vast empty dust plain on Mars might be considered similar to Earth meteorites found on the vast empty ice plains of Antarctica. The finding raises speculations about the general abundance of rocks on Mars that have fallen there from outer space.