mick laBriola

Tracy Chapman (born March 30, 1964) is an American singer-songwriter. Chapman is best known for her hit singles “Fast Car” and “Give Me One Reason“.

Chapman was signed to Elektra Records by Bob Krasnow in 1987. The following year she released her debut album, Tracy Chapman, which became a commercial success, boosted by her appearance at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, and was certified 6× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album received six Grammy Award nominations, including one for Album of the Year, three of which she won; Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her single “Fast Car”, and Best Contemporary Folk Album. In 1989, Chapman released her second album, Crossroads, which earned her an additional Grammy Award nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Her third album, Matters of the Heart, followed in 1992.

Chapman’s fourth album, New Beginning, was released in 1995 and became another worldwide success. It was certified 5× platinum by the RIAA and yielded the hit single “Give Me One Reason”, which earned Chapman the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. Five years would pass before the release of her fifth album, Telling Stories (2000). Let It Rain and Where You Live followed in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Chapman’s most recent studio album is Our Bright Future, released in 2008. The remastered compilation album Greatest Hits, which was curated by Chapman herself, was released in 2015.

Chapman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Her parents divorced when she was four years old. Chapman was raised by her mother, who bought her a ukulele at age three. Chapman began playing guitar and writing songs at age eight.

Eric Patrick Clapton CBE (born 30 March 1945) is an English rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most successful and influential guitarists in rock music. Clapton ranked second in Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time“ and fourth in Gibson‘s “Top 50 Guitarists of All Time”. He was also named number five in Time magazine’s list of “The 10 Best Electric Guitar Players” in 2009.

After playing in a number of different local bands, Clapton joined the Yardbirds in 1963, replacing founding guitarist Top Topham. Dissatisfied with the change of the Yardbirds sound from blues rock to a more radio-friendly pop rock sound, Clapton left in 1965 to play with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. On leaving Mayall in 1966, after one album, he formed the power trio Cream with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce, in which Clapton played sustained blues improvisations and “arty, blues-based psychedelic pop”.After Cream broke up in November 1968, he formed the blues rock band Blind Faith with Baker, Steve Winwood, and Ric Grech, recording one album and performing on one tour before they broke up. Clapton embarked on a solo career in 1970.

Alongside his solo career, he also performed with Delaney & Bonnie and Derek and the Dominos, with whom he recorded “Layla“, one of his signature songs. He continued to record a number of successful solo albums and songs over the next several decades, including a 1974 cover of Bob Marley‘s “I Shot the Sheriff” (which helped reggae reach a mass market), the country-infused Slowhand album (1977) and the pop rock of 1986’s August. Following the death of his son Conor in 1991, Clapton’s grief was expressed in the song “Tears in Heaven“, which appeared on his Unplugged album, and in 1996 he had another top-40 hit with the R&B crossover “Change the World“. In 1998, he released the Grammy award-winning “My Father’s Eyes“. Since 1999, he has recorded a number of traditional blues and blues rock albums and hosted the periodic Crossroads Guitar Festival. His most recent studio album is Happy Xmas (2018).

Clapton has received 18 Grammy Awards as well as the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2004, he was awarded a CBE for services to music. He has received four Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist and separately as a member of the Yardbirds and of Cream. In his solo career, Clapton has sold more than 280 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. In 1998, Clapton, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance abusers.

Wolf-Rayet star. Wolf-Rayet stars in general have over 20 times the mass of our Sun and expel fast particle winds that can create iconic looking nebulas. In this case, the resulting star bubble spans over 60 light years, is about 70,000 years old, and happens to look like the head of a dolphin. Named Sh2-308 and dubbed the Dolphin-Head Nebula, the gas ball lies about 5,000 light years away and covers as much sky as the full moon — although it is much dimmer. The nearby red-tinged clouds on the left of the featured image may owe their glow and shape to energetic light emitted from the same Wolf-Rayet star.

Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou ; 29 March 1943 – 17 May 2022), known professionally as Vangelis(/væŋˈɡɛlɪs/ vang-GHEL-iss; Greek: Βαγγέλης, pronounced [vaɲˈɟelis]), was a Greek composer and arranger of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He was best known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire (1981), as well as for composing scores to the films Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982), Antarctica (1983), The Bounty (1984), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and Alexander(2004), and for the use of his music in the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.

Born in Agria and raised in Athens, Vangelis began his career in the 1960s as a member of the rock bands The Forminx and Aphrodite’s Child; the latter’s album 666 (1972) is now recognised as a progressive–psychedelic rock classic. Vangelis first settled in Paris, and gained initial recognition for his scores to the Frédéric Rossif animal documentaries L’Apocalypse des Animaux, La Fête sauvage, and Opéra sauvage.

Reports of powerful solar flares started a seven-hour quest north to capture modern monuments against an aurora-filled sky. The peaks of iconic Arctic Henge in Raufarhöfn in northern Iceland were already aligned with the stars: some are lined up toward the exact north from one side and toward exact south from the other. The featured image, taken after sunset late last month, looks directly south, but since the composite image covers so much of the sky, the north star Polaris is actually visible at the very top of the frame. Also visible are familiar constellations including the Great Bear (Ursa Major) on the left, and the Hunter (Orion) on the lower right. The quest was successful. The sky lit up dramatically with bright and memorable auroras that shimmered with amazing colors including red, pink, yellow, and green — sometimes several at once.

This luminous Picture of the Week shows Z 229-15 — imaged here in beautiful detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — a celestial object that lies about 390 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Z 229-15 is one of those interesting celestial objects that, should you choose to research it, you will find defined as several different things: sometimes as an active galactic nucleus (an AGN); sometimes as a quasar; and sometimes as a Seyfert galaxy. Which of these is Z 229-15 really? The answer is that it is all of these things all at once, because these three definitions have significant overlap.

AGNs and quasars are both described in detail in the Hubble Word Bank, but in essence an AGN is a small region at the heart of certain galaxies (called active galaxies) that is far brighter than just the galaxy’s stars would be. The extra luminosity is due to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. Material sucked into a black hole actually doesn’t fall directly into it, but instead is drawn into a swirling disc, from where it is inexorably tugged towards the black hole. This disc of matter gets so hot that it releases a large amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, and that’s what makes AGNs appear so bright.

Quasars are a particular type of AGN; they are typically both extremely bright and extremely distant from Earth — several hundred million light-years is considered nearby for a quasar, making Z 229-15 positively local. Often an AGN is so bright that the rest of the galaxy cannot be seen, but Seyfert galaxies are active galaxies that host very bright AGNs (quasars) while the rest of the galaxy is still observable. So Z 229-15 is a Seyfert galaxy that contains a quasar, and that, by definition, hosts an AGN. Classification in astronomy can be a challenge!

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It has two almost-straight arms coming from the left and right of the core that meet a starry ring around the galaxy’s edge. The ring is bluish in colour, and the core is golden and shining. A faint halo of light also surrounds the galaxy. There is one bright star with many diffraction spikes, and a few small stars all around on a black background.]