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Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald; naturalised French Joséphine Baker; 3 June 1906 – 12 April 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics, directed by Mario Nalpas and Henri Étiévant.

During her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the “Black Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, the “Bronze Venus”, and the “Creole Goddess”. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She raised her children in France.

She aided the French Resistance during World War II. After the war, she was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker sang: “I have two loves, my country and Paris.”

Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and is noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement. In 1968, she was offered unofficial leadership in the movement in the United States by Coretta Scott King, following Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassination. After thinking it over, Baker declined the offer out of concern for the welfare of her children.

On 30 November 2021, she was interred in the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France. As her resting place remains in Monaco Cemetery, a cenotaph was installed in vault 13 of the crypt in the Panthéon.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides us this week with a spectacular image of the bright star-forming ring that surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097. In this image, the larger-scale structure of the galaxy is barely visible: its comparatively dim spiral arms, which surround its heart in a loose embrace, reach out beyond the edges of this frame. This face-on galaxy, lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), is particularly attractive for astronomers. NGC 1097 is a Seyfert galaxy. Lurking at the very centre of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our Sun is gradually sucking in the matter around it. The area immediately around the black hole shines powerfully with radiation coming from the material falling in. The distinctive ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation due to an inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy. These star-forming regions are glowing brightly thanks to emission from clouds of ionised hydrogen. The ring is around 5000 light-years across, although the spiral arms of the galaxy extend tens of thousands of light-years beyond it. NGC 1097 is also pretty exciting for supernova hunters. The galaxy experienced three supernovae (the violent deaths of high-mass stars) in the 11-year span between 1992 and 2003. This is definitely a galaxy worth checking on a regular basis. However, what it is really exciting about NGC 1097 is that it is not wandering alone through space. It has two small galaxy companions, which dance “the dance of stars and the dance of space” like the gracious dancer of the famous poem The Dancer by Khalil Gibran. The satellite galaxies are NGC 1097A, an elliptical galaxy orbiting 42 000 light-years from the centre of NGC 1097 and a small dwarf galaxy named NGC 1097B. Both galaxies are located out beyond the frames of this image and they cannot be seen

Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, OM, GCVO  2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King’s Musick in 1924.

Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British Army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory.

In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar’s music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music continues to be played more in Britain than elsewhere.

Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the moving-coil microphone in 1923 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.

N44 is a complex nebula filled with glowing hydrogen gas, dark lanes of dust, massive stars, and many populations of stars of different ages. One of its most distinctive features, however, is the dark, starry gap called a “superbubble,” visible in this Hubble Space Telescope image in the upper central region. The hole is about 250 light-years wide and its presence is still something of a mystery. Stellar winds expelled by massive stars in the bubble’s interior may have driven away the gas, but this is inconsistent with measured wind velocities in the bubble. Another possibility, since the nebula is filled with massive stars that would expire in titanic explosions, is that the expanding shells of old supernovae sculpted the cosmic cavern. Astronomers have found one supernova remnant in the vicinity of the superbubble and identified an approximately 5 million year difference in age between stars within and at the rim of the superbubble, indicating multiple, chain-reaction star-forming events. The deep blue area at about 5 o’clock around the superbubble is one of the hottest regions of the nebula and the area of the most intense star formation. N44 is an emission nebula, which means its gas has been energized, or ionized, by the radiation of nearby stars. As the ionized gas begins to cool from its higher-energy state to a lower-energy state, it emits energy in the form of light, causing the nebula to glow. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, N44 spans about 1,000 light-years and is about 170,000 light-years away from Earth.

Ronald David Wood (born 1 June 1947) is an English rock musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, artist, author, and radio personality best known as a member of the Rolling Stones since 1975, as well as a member of Faces and the Jeff Beck Group.

Wood began his career in 1964, when he joined the Birds on guitar. He then joined the mod group the Creation, but remained with the group only for a short time and appeared on only a few of their singles. He joined the Jeff Beck Group in 1967 as a bass guitarist. Their two albums, Truth and Beck-Ola, are both highly praised.

The group split in 1969 and Wood departed along with lead vocalist Rod Stewart to join former Small Faces members Ronnie Lane, Ian McLagan, and Kenney Jones in a new group named Faces with Wood now primarily on guitar. The group found great success in the UK and mainland Europe, though achieved only cult status in the US. Wood sang and co-wrote the popular title track from their final LP, Ooh La La, released in 1973. He also worked extensively on Stewart’s first few solo albums.

As the group began to split he began several solo projects, eventually recording his first solo LP, I’ve Got My Own Album to Do, in 1974. The album featured bandmate McLagan as well as former BeatleGeorge Harrison and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, a longtime friend of Wood. After the departure of Mick Taylor from the Stones, Richards soon invited Wood to join them; he did so in 1975, initially on a temporary basis, but became an official member in 1976; however, he was not officially inducted as a financial partner until bassist Bill Wyman‘s departure in 1993.

Besides I’ve Got My Own Album to Do, Wood has recorded several other solo efforts. Now Look was released in 1975, and peaked at No. 118 on Billboard; he also collaborated with Ronnie Lane for the soundtrack album Mahoney’s Last Stand. Wood also released Gimme Some Neck in 1979, which hit No. 45 in the US; 1234 was released in 1981, peaking at No. 164. He released Slide on This in 1992, Not for Beginners came out in 2002. and I Feel Like Playing in 2010. As a member of the Rolling Stones, Wood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and was inducted a second time, as a member of Faces, in April 2012.

Herbie Lovelle (1 June 1924 – April 8, 2009) was an American drummer, who played jazz, R&B, rock, and folk. He was also a studio musician and an actor.

Lovelle’s uncle was the drummer Arthur Herbert. Lovelle began his career with the trumpeter, singer and band leader Hot Lips Page in the late 1940s, then played in the 1950s with the saxophonist Hal Singer, Johnny Moore‘s Three Blazers and the pianist Earl Hines. Through working for both Lucky Thompson and Jimmy Rushing of Count Basie’s Orchestra, he became house drummer at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City for much of the 1950s. He toured with the tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobband the pianist Teddy Wilson in 1954. In 1959 he contributed to the pianist Paul Curry’s album Paul Curry Presents the Friends of Fats, released on the Golden Crest label.

In the early years of television, he performed with the King Guion Orchestra on the Jerry Lester Show and the Ed Sullivan Show. In 1966, he was the lead drummer for the Sammy Davis, Jr. TV show.

Lovelle began playing more R&B in the 1950s and worked as a studio musician, often with Sam Taylor. He played on albums by Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), Pearls Before Swine, Eric Andersen, David Blue, John Denver, Tom Rush, B. B. King, John Martyn (Stormbringer!), the Strangeloves, the McCoys, and the Monkees. He continued working as a studio musician well into the 1980s.

In 1976, he produced the first album by Stuff, which went platinum in Japan. He also played drums in the 1976 revival of Guys and Dolls.

From the 1980s on, he acted in film and television, including on Law & Order (1995–2004). His film credits include Bella (2006), Mitchellville (2004) (Sundance), The Rhythm of the Saints (2003), Don’t Explain (2002), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion(2001), Down to Earth (2001), Girlfight (2000), Maximum Risk (1996), Getting Away with Murder (1996), White Lies (1996), Bleeding Hearts (1994), The Paper (1994), Running on Empty (1988), Death Wish III (1985), A Man Called Adam (1966).

His TV credits include Into the Fire (2005), How Do You Spell Belief? (2005), Kingpin Rising (2005), Third Watch (2 episodes, 2005), and Law & Order TV (1995–2004).

The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a, M51a, and NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. Its distance is 31 million light-years away from Earth.

The galaxy and its companion, NGC 5195, are easily observed by amateur astronomers, and the two galaxies may be seen with binoculars. The Whirlpool Galaxy has been extensively observed by professional astronomers, who study it to understand galaxy structure (particularly structure associated with the spiral arms) and galaxy interactions.

John Henry “Bonzo” Bonham (31 May 1948 – 25 September 1980) was an English musician, best known as the drummer for the English rock band Led Zeppelin. Esteemed for his speed, power, fast single-footed kick drumming, distinctive sound, and feel for the groove, he is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential rock drummers in history.

Bonham was born in 1948 in Redditch, Worcestershire, and took up drums at the age of five, receiving a snare drum at the age of 10 and a full drum set at the age of 15. He played with multiple local bands both at school and following school, eventually playing in two different bands with Robert Plant. Following the demise of the Yardbirds in 1968, Bonham joined Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones to form Led Zeppelin. With the band, Bonham mostly showcased a hard-hitting hard rock style, but also handled funk and Latin-influenced grooves in later releases. Like Keith Moon of the Who, Bonham’s drum set grew in size following the band’s 1969 concert tours, including congas or timpani and a gong. His drum solo “Moby Dick” was featured on the group’s second album and was a staple of their concerts, often lasting over 20 minutes. Outside of Led Zeppelin, Bonham played drums for other artists, including the Family Dogg, Screaming Lord Sutch, Lulu, Jimmy Stevens and Wings. Bonham played with Led Zeppelin until his death at the age of 32, in September 1980 following a day of heavy drinking. The surviving members disbanded the group out of respect for Bonham after his death.

A mostly self-taught drummer, Bonham was influenced by Max Roach, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. He was close with Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice, who introduced him to Ludwig drums. While he was primarily known for his hard-rock style during his lifetime, his reputation as a drummer has grown beyond that genre following his death: he is now seen as one of the greatest drummers of all time. He has influenced numerous drummers, including Dave Grohl, Neil Peart, Chad Smith and Dave Lombardo. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 as a member of Led Zeppelin. In 2016, Rolling Stone named him the greatest drummer of all time.

On 24 September 1980, Bonham was picked up by Led Zeppelin assistant Rex King to attend rehearsals at Bray Studios for a tour of North America, to begin 17 October in Montreal, Canada; it was the band’s first tour since 1977. During the journey, Bonham asked to stop for breakfast, where he drank four quadruple vodka screwdrivers (16 shots between 400 and 560 ml). He then continued to drink heavily after arriving at rehearsals. The band stopped rehearsing late in the evening and then went to Page’s house, the Old Mill House in Clewer, Windsor. After midnight on 25 September, Bonham fell asleep; someone took him to bed and placed him on his side. Led Zeppelin tour manager Benji LeFevre and bassist John Paul Jones found him unresponsive the next afternoon. Bonham was later pronounced dead at 32 years old.

Louis Hayes (born May 31, 1937) is an American jazz drummer and band leader. He was with McCoy Tyner‘s trio for more than three years. Since 1989 he has led his own band, and together with Vincent Herring formed the Cannonball Legacy Band.

Louis Sedell Hayes was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States, to a father, an automaker, who played drums and piano. His mother waited tables and played the piano. She was the sister of John Nelson, the father of the musician Prince. Hayes got his first drum set at age 10. The key influence in his early development was his cousin Clarence Stamps, an accomplished drummer who grounded his technical fundamentals and gave him lessons that stuck for life. He refers to the early influence of hearing jazz, especially big bands on the radio. His main influence was Philly Joe Jones and he was mentored by Jo Jones. His three main associations were with Horace Silver‘s Quintet (1956–59), the Cannonball Adderley Quintet (1959–65), and the Oscar Peterson Trio (1965–67). Hayes often joined Sam Jones, both with Adderley and Peterson, and in freelance settings.

When he was a teenager, he led a band in Detroit clubs before he was 16. He worked with Yusef Lateef and Curtis Fuller from 1955 to 1956. He moved to New York in August 1956, to replace Art Taylor in the Horace Silver Quintet and, in 1959, joined the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, with which he remained until mid-1965, when he succeeded Ed Thigpen in the Oscar Peterson Trio. He left Peterson in 1967, and formed a series of groups, which he led alone or with others; among his sidemen were Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Kenny Barron, and James Spaulding. He returned to Peterson in 1971.