mick laBriola

This ominous Picture of the Week shows our very own Moon undergoing a total lunar eclipse. The image was taken on the night of May 15 2022 from ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth is positioned directly between the Sun and the Moon, blocking some of the Sun’s light. This casts a shadow across the Moon’s surface.  The red colour is caused by the Sun’s rays interacting with the Earth’s atmosphere. Light from the Sun contains a whole spectrum of colours. Blue light is dispersed by the atmosphere through a process called Rayleigh scattering (which makes the sky blue) while red light can pass through the atmosphere more easily, becoming slightly deflected. This red light reaches the Moon’s surface, giving rise to its dramatic crimson hue.  This photo was taken during the eclipse’s totality, when the Earth is causing the largest blockage of the Sun’s light. It was taken by two ESO colleagues at Paranal Observatory using an amateur telescope nicknamed “UT5” as a nod to its much larger siblings, the four 8-m Unit Telescopes at ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Fun fact: astronomers often take spectra of lunar eclipses to understand the signatures that life can leave on Earth’s atmosphere, which is a very useful reference when searching for similar signatures in exoplanets.

Nathaniel “Nat” Adderley Jr. (born May 23, 1955) is an American pop and rhythm and blues music arranger and pianist who spent much of his music career arranging as music director for Luther Vandross tours and contributed as co-songwriter on most of Vandross’s albums. His father Nat Adderley(1931–2000) was a composer and jazz cornet and trumpet player, while his uncle Cannonball Adderley (1928–1975) was a jazz alto saxophonist.

Nat Adderley Jr. was born in Quincy, Florida on May 23, 1955. The scion of a famed jazz family, he grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, moving to that suburban New York City community with his family when he was five years old. He started playing piano as a child and had his first song, “I’m on My Way”, recorded by his uncle Cannonball on the 1967 album Why Am I Treated So Bad! by the Cannonball Adderley Quintet when the young Nat Adderley was only 11 years old. While at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City, Adderley first met Luther Vandross, who attended Taft High School in the Bronx. Adderley would end up spending much of his musical career with Vandross. He attended Yale University, graduating with a degree in African American studies.

While living in Houston, Texas, he was the music arranger for the 1981 album Never Too Much which became Vandross’s first hit with the title track, which reached number 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 and fourth on the dance charts. He continued working with Vandross, whom he called “a hilarious guy, a great employer, a great friend, and an incredible musician”, until the singer’s stroke in February 2003 that effectively ended his career.

Adderley has returned to his jazz roots, performing his own works, as well as tributes to both his father and uncle. He cites his influences as Chick Corea, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. In a 2009 interview with the Star-Ledger he said pianists “who are killing me” include Kenny Barron, Herbie Hancock, Cedar Walton and Joe Zawinul.

As of 2009, Nat Adderley Jr is a resident of West Orange, New Jersey.

Westerhout 40 or W40 (also designated Sharpless 64, Sh2-64, or RCW 174) is a star-forming region in the Milky Way located in the constellation Serpens. In this region, interstellar gas forming a diffuse nebula surrounds a cluster of several hundred new-born stars. The distance to W40 is 436 ± 9 pc (1420 ± 30 light years), making it one of the closest sites of formation of high-mass O-type and B-type stars. The ionizing radiationfrom the massive OB stars has created an H II region, which has an hour-glass morphology.

Dust from the molecular cloud in which W40 formed obscures the nebula, rendering W40 difficult to observe at visible wavelengths of light. Thus, X-ray, infrared, and radio observations have been used to see through the molecular cloud to study the star-formation processes going on within.

W40 appears near to several other star-forming regions in the sky, including an infrared dark cloud designated Serpens South and a young stellar cluster designated the Serpens Main Cluster. Similar distances measured for these three star-forming regions suggests that they are near to each other and part of the same larger-scale collection of clouds known as the Serpens Molecular Cloud.

Le Sony’r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, “cosmic” philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led “The Arkestra”, an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up.

Born and raised in Alabama, Blount became involved in the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Le Sony’r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian god of the Sun). Claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, he developed a mythical persona and an idiosyncratic credo that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Throughout his life he denied ties to his prior identity saying, “Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym.”

His widely eclectic and avant-garde music echoed the entire history of jazz, from ragtime and early New Orleans hot jazz, to swing music, bebop, free jazz and fusion. His compositions ranged from keyboard solos to works for big bands of over 30 musicians, along with electronic excursions, songs, chants, percussion pieces, and anthems. From the mid-1950s until his death, Ra led the musical collective The Arkestra (which featured artists such as Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and June Tyson throughout its various iterations). Its performances often included dancers and musicians dressed in elaborate, futuristic costumes inspired by ancient Egyptian attire and the Space Age. Following Ra’s illness-forced retirement in 1992, the band remained active as The Sun Ra Arkestra, and, as of 2021, continues performing under the leadership of veteran Ra sideman Marshall Allen.

Though his mainstream success was limited, Sun Ra was a prolific recording artist and frequent live performer, and remained influential throughout his life for his music and persona. He is now widely considered an innovator; among his distinctions are his pioneering work in free improvisation and modal jazz and his early use of electronic keyboards and synthesizers. Over the course of his career, he recorded dozens of singles and over one hundred full-length albums, comprising well over 1,000 songs, making him one of the most prolific recording artists of the 20th century.

He was born Herman Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, as discovered by his biographer, John F. Szwed, and published in his 1998 book. He was named after the popular vaudeville stage magician Black Herman, who had deeply impressed his mother. He was nicknamed “Sonny” from his childhood, had an older sister and half-brother, and was doted upon by his mother and grandmother.

Wilhelm Richard Wagner  22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, “music dramas”). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.

Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).

Until his final years, Wagner’s life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment – particularly, since the late 20th century, where they express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.

Very faint planetary nebula Abell 7 is some 1,800 light-years distant, just south of Orion in planet Earth’s skies in the constellation Lepus, The Hare. Surrounded by Milky Way stars and near the line-of-sight to distant background galaxies, its generally simple spherical shape, about 8 light-years in diameter, is outlined in this deep telescopic image. Within its confines are beautiful, more complex details enhanced by the use of narrowband filters. Emission from hydrogen is shown in reddish hues with oxygen emission mapped to green and blue colors, giving Abell 7 a natural appearance that would otherwise be much too faint to be appreciatedby eye. A planetary nebula represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our own Sun will experience 5 billion years hence, as the nebula’s central, once sun-like star shrugs off its outer layers. Abell 7 itself is estimated to be 20,000 years old. Its central star is seen here as a fading white dwarf some 10 billion years old.