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This gauzy-looking celestial body is UGC 5829, an irregular galaxy that lies about 30 million light-years away. Despite there not being many observations of this relatively faint galaxy, it has the distinction of having a descriptive soubriquet: the Spider Galaxy. Perhaps the distorted galactic arms with their glowing, star-forming tips bring to mind the clawed legs of an arachnid. Somewhat confusingly, there is another, very similarly nicknamed but otherwise entirely distinct, galaxy known as the Spiderweb Galaxy. This galaxy has also been more extensively imaged (notably by Hubble), despite the fact that it lies about 300 times further from Earth than the Spider Galaxy does.
Fortunately, correct galaxy identification does not depend on casual given names. Rather, known galaxies are recorded in at least one catalogue — and often in several — such as the Uppsala General Catalogue of Galaxies, which gives the Spider Galaxy its more formal title of UGC 5829. This same galaxy also has several different designations in various other catalogues: it is, for example, LEDA 31923 in the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database; MCG+06-24-006 in the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies; and SDSS J104242.78+342657.3 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Catalogue. The Spiderweb Galaxy isn’t recorded in all of the same catalogues — each is necessarily limited in scope — but it is included in the LEDA catalogue as LEDA 2826829. It is evidently simpler to not conflate the dull but distinct names LEDA 31923 and LEDA 2826829, than the fun but easily confused Spider and Spiderweb!
more...Wilson Pickett (March 18, 1941 – January 19, 2006 Prattville, AL) was an American singer and songwriter.
A major figure in the development of soul music, Pickett recorded over 50 songs which made the US R&Bcharts, many of which crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100. Among his best-known hits are “In the Midnight Hour” (which he co-wrote), “Land of 1000 Dances“, “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)“, “Mustang Sally“, “Funky Broadway“, “Engine No. 9”, and “Don’t Knock My Love“.
Pickett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, in recognition of his impact on songwriting and recording.
more...Andy Narell (born March 18, 1954 NY,NY) is an American jazz steel pannist, composer and producer.
Narell took up the steelpan at a young age in Queens, New York. His father, who was a social worker, had started a program of steelpan playing for at-risk youth at the Jewish philanthropic Education Alliance in Lower East Side Manhattan using two sets of pans made by Rupert Sterling, a native of Antigua. Beginning in 1962, Andy, his brother Jeff, and three others boys played on a third set of Sterling-made pans in the basement of the Narell house in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, calling themselves the Steel Bandits. The band was a novelty steelpan act that played concerts and appeared on television shows, including I’ve Got a Secret in 1963.
The band played Carnegie Hall and at the National Music Festival of Trinidad. Murray Narell invited Ellie Mannette in 1964 to expand steelpan activities in New York City and convinced him to come in 1967. Mannette taught the Narell boys more technique, and they played on improved pans tuned by Mannette.
Narell studied music at the University of California, Berkeley and played piano with the University of California Jazz Ensembles under the direction of David W. Tucker. He graduated in 1973.
He started the record label Hip Pocket and released his first solo album, Hidden Treasures, in 1979. With an interest in Caribbean music, Latin jazz, and rhythm and blues, he joined the Caribbean Jazz Project in 1995 with Dave Samuels and Paquito D’Rivera.
He has performed with Montreux, Sakésho, Calypsociation, and Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. He composed and arranged music for Trinidad‘s national steelband competition, Panorama. Narell performed in South Africa in 1999 in front of a crowd of 80,000 people.
more...William Richard Frisell (born March 18, 1951) is an American jazz guitarist. He first came to prominence at ECM Records in the 1980s, as both a session player and a leader. He went on to work in a variety of contexts, notably as a participant in the Downtown Scene in New York City, where he formed a long working relationship with composer and saxophonist John Zorn. He was also a longtime member of veteran drummer Paul Motian‘s groups from the early 1980s until Motian’s death in 2011. Since the late 1990s, Frisell’s output as a bandleader has also integrated prominent elements of folk, country, rock ‘n’ rolland Americana. He has six Grammy nominations and one win.
more...NGC 7714, has been stretched and distorted by a recent collision with a neighboring galaxy. This smaller neighbor, NGC 7715, situated off to the left of the frame, is thought to have charged right through NGC 7714. Observations indicate that the golden ring pictured is composed of millions of older Sun-like stars that are likely co-moving with the interior bluer stars. In contrast, the bright center of NGC 7714 appears to be undergoing a burst of new star formation. The featured image was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 7714 is located about 130 million light years away toward the constellation of the Two Fish (Pisces). The interactions between these galaxies likely started about 150 million years ago and should continue for several hundred million years more, after which a single central galaxy may result.
more...Jessica Jennifer Williams (March 17, 1948 – March 10, 2022 Baltimore, MD) was an American jazz pianist and composer.
Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 17, 1948. She started playing the piano at age four, began music lessons with a private teacher at five, and at age seven was enrolled into the Peabody Preparatory. She studied classical music and ear training with Richard Aitken and George Bellows at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
At age twelve, Williams was listening to Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus. She began performing jazz in her teens, playing with Richie Cole, Buck Hill, and Mickey Fields. In a radio interview with Marian McPartland on NPR‘s Piano Jazz from 1992, she stated that her main influences were not pianists, but Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
more...Paul Horn (March 17, 1930 – June 29, 2014) was an American flautist, saxophonist, composer and producer. He became a pioneer of world and new age music with his 1969 album Inside. He received five Grammy nominations between 1965 and 1999, including three nominations in 1965.
Horn was born on March 17, 1930, in New York City and had Jewish ancestry through his father. The family moved to Washington, D.C., when Horn was four. He took up the piano at age four, followed by the clarinet at 12. While in Washington, D.C., Horn attended Theodore Roosevelt High School and the Washington College of Music. In the summer of 1942, Horn worked as an usher at the Earl Theatre to buy a clarinet. He studied the clarinet and flute at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree. In June 1953, Horn gained a master’s from the Manhattan School of Music.
Moving to Los Angeles, he played with Chico Hamilton‘s quintet from 1956 to 1958 and became an established West Coast session player. He played on the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s Suite Thursday and worked with Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and others. He scored the 1959 animated television series Clutch Cargo. During the same year he appeared briefly in Roger Corman’s film A Bucket of Blood.
more...Nathaniel Adams Coles (March 17, 1919 – February 15, 1965 Montgomery, AL), known professionally by his stage name Nat King Cole, was an American singer, jazz pianist, and actor. Cole’s career as a jazz and pop vocalist started in the late 1930s and spanned almost three decades where he found success and recorded over 100 songs that became hits on the pop charts.
Cole started his career as a jazz pianist in the late 1930s, where he formed The King Cole Trio which became the top-selling group (and the only black act) on Capitol Records in the 1940s. His trio was the model for small jazz ensembles that followed. Starting in 1950 he transitioned to become a solo singer billed as Nat King Cole. Despite achieving mainstream success, during his career he faced intense racial discrimination. While not a major vocal public figure in the civil rights movement, Cole was a member of his local NAACP branch and participated in the 1963 March on Washington. He regularly performed for civil rights organizations. From 1956 to 1957, he hosted the NBC variety series The Nat King Cole Show, which became the first nationally broadcast television show hosted by an African American.
Some of his most notable singles include “Unforgettable“, “Smile“, “L-O-V-E“, “When I Fall in Love“, “Let There Be Love“, “Mona Lisa“, “Autumn Leaves“, “Stardust“, “Straighten Up and Fly Right“, “The Very Thought of You“, “For Sentimental Reasons“, “Embraceable You” and “Almost Like Being in Love“. His 1960 Christmas album The Magic of Christmas (also known as The Christmas Song), is the best-selling Christmas album released in the 1960s; and was ranked as one of the 40 essential Christmas albums (2019) by Rolling Stone. In 2022, his recording of “The Christmas Song“, broke the record for the longest journey to the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100, when it peaked at number nine, 62-years after it debuted on the chart; and was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry. NPR named him one of the 50 Great Voices. He received numerous accolades including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1960) and a Special Achievement Golden Globe Award.Posthumously, Cole has received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1990), along with the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award (1992) and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame(2000), and the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame (2020).
He was the father of singer Natalie Cole (1950–2015), who covered her father’s songs in the 1991 album Unforgettable… with Love.Cole’s entire left lung was surgically removed. His father died of heart problems on February 1. Throughout Cole’s illness his publicists promoted the idea that he would soon be well and working, despite the private knowledge of his terminal condition. Billboard magazine reported that “Nat King Cole has successfully come through a serious operation and… the future looks bright for ‘the master’ to resume his career again”. On Valentine’s Day, Cole and his wife briefly left St. John’s to drive by the sea. He died at the hospital early in the morning hours of Monday, February 15, 1965, at the age of 45.
more...12P/Pons–Brooks is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 71 years. Comets with an orbital period of 20 to 200 years are referred to as Halley-type comets. It is one of the brightest known periodic comets, reaching an absolute visual magnitude of about 5 in its approach to perihelion. Comet Pons-Brooks was definitely discovered at Marseilles Observatory in July 1812 by Jean-Louis Pons, and on its next appearance in 1883 by William Robert Brooks. There are ancient records of comets that may have been 12P/Pons–Brooks.
The next perihelion passage is 21 April 2024, with closest approach to Earth being 1.55 AU(232 million km) on 2 June 2024. The comet is expected to brighten to about apparent magnitude4.5. The comet nucleus is estimated to be around 30 km in diameter assuming it was not producing too much dust and gas during the 2020 photometry.
12P/Pons–Brooks may be the parent body of the weak December κ-Draconids meteor shower that is active from about November 29 to December 13.
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Ramzan Paskayev (Chechen: Рамзан Паскаев) (born March 16, 1947 in Taraz, Kazakhstan) is a Chechen accordionist and folk musician. He is regarded by many as the contemporary successor to late Chechen accordionist Umar Dimayev.
Paskayev was born in Taraz to Chechen parents on March 16, 1947. His family been sent to Kazakhstanas a result of the forced deportations of the Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia on February 23, 1944. Ramzan’s father Sultan worked as a truck driver and gathered wheat on a collective farm to help support his family. Sultan had managed to bring a German accordion from his home in Chechnya, and during evenings the young Ramzan would constantly bother his father to play the accordion out of curiosity.
more...Jerry Jeff Walker (born Ronald Clyde Crosby; March 16, 1942 – October 23, 2020) was an American country and folk singer-songwriter. He was a leading figure in the progressive country and outlaw countrymusic movement. He was best known for having written the 1968 song “Mr. Bojangles“.
Walker was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, New York, on March 16, 1942. His father, Mel, worked as a sports referee and bartender; his mother, Alma (Conrow), was a housewife. His maternal grandparents played for square dances in the Oneonta area – his grandmother, Jessie Conrow, playing piano, while his grandfather played fiddle. During the late 1950s, Crosby was a member of a local Oneonta teen band called The Tones.
more...Thomas Lee Flanagan (March 16, 1930 – November 16, 2001) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He grew up in Detroit, initially influenced by such pianists as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole, and then by bebop musicians. Within months of moving to New York in 1956, he had recorded with Miles Davis and on Sonny Rollins‘ album Saxophone Colossus. Recordings under various leaders, including Giant Steps of John Coltrane, continued well into 1962, when he became vocalist Ella Fitzgerald‘s full-time accompanist. He worked with Fitzgerald for three years until 1965, and then in 1968 returned to be her pianist and musical director, this time for a decade.
After leaving Fitzgerald in 1978, Flanagan attracted praise for the elegance of his playing, which was principally in trio settings when under his own leadership. In his 45-year recording career, he recorded more than three dozen albums under his own name and more than 200 as a sideman. By the time of his death, he was one of the most widely admired jazz pianists and had influenced both his contemporaries and later generations of players.
Flanagan was born in Conant Gardens, Detroit, Michigan, on March 16, 1930. He was the youngest of six children – five boys and a girl. His parents were both originally from Georgia. His father, Johnson Sr, was a postman, and his mother, Ida Mae, worked in the garment industry.
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