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This Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts the galaxy NGC 4951, a spiral galaxythat’s located 49 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.
The data used to make this image were captured by Hubble as part of a programme to examine how matter and energy travel in nearby galaxies. Galaxies continuously undergo a cycle of star formation whereby the gas in a galaxy forms molecular clouds, which collapse to create new stars, which then disperse the clouds they formed from with powerful radiation or stellar winds in a process called feedback. The remaining gas is left to form new clouds elsewhere. This cycle of moving matter and energy determines how fast a galaxy forms stars and how quickly it burns through its supplies of gas — that is, how it evolves over the course of its life. Understanding this evolution depends on the nebulae, stars and star clusters in the galaxy: when they formed and their past behaviour. Hubble has always excelled at measuring populations of stars, and the task of tracking gas and star formation in galaxies including NGC 4951 is no exception.
NGC 4951 is also a Seyfert galaxy, a type of galaxy that has a very bright and energetic nucleus called an active galactic nucleus. This image demonstrates well how energetic the galaxy is, and some of the dynamic galactic activity which transports matter and energy throughout it: a shining core surrounded by swirling arms, glowing pink star-forming regions, and thick dust.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy, tilted diagonally. It has thick, cloudy spiral arms wrapping around the core. They are filled with pink patches marking new star formation, young blue stars, and dark wisps of dust that block light. The galaxy glows brightly from its core. It is on a dark background, with a few distant galaxies and unrelated stars around it.]
Jaime Royal “Robbie” Robertson OC (July 5, 1943 – August 9, 2023) was a Canadian musician. He was lead guitarist for Bob Dylan in the mid-late 1960s and early-mid 1970s, guitarist and songwriter with The Band from their inception until 1978, and a solo artist.
Robertson’s work with the Band was instrumental in creating the Americana musicgenre. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as a member of the Band, and into Canada’s Walk of Fame, with the Band and on his own. He is ranked 59th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists. He wrote “The Weight“, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“, and “Up on Cripple Creek” with the Band and had solo hits with “Broken Arrow” and “Somewhere Down the Crazy River“, and many others. He was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Songwriters.
Robertson collaborated on film and TV soundtracks, usually with director Martin Scorsese, beginning in the rockumentary film The Last Waltz (1978) and continuing through dramatic films including Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Silence(2016), The Irishman (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), scoring the latter shortly before his death. The film was dedicated to his memory, and garnered him a posthumous nomination for Best Original Score at the Academy Awards.
more...Arthur Murray Blythe (July 5, 1940 – March 27, 2017) was an American jazz alto saxophonist and composer. He was described by critic Chris Kelsey as displaying “one of the most easily recognizable alto sax sounds in jazz, big and round, with a fast, wide vibrato and an aggressive, precise manner of phrasing” and furthermore as straddling the avant garde and traditionalist jazz, often with bands featuring unusual instrumentation.
Born in Los Angeles, Blythe lived in San Diego, returning to Los Angeles when he was 19 years old. He took up the alto saxophone at the age of nine, playing R&B until his mid-teens when he discovered jazz. In the mid-1960s, Blythe was part of the Underground Musicians and Artists Association (UGMAA), founded by Horace Tapscott, on whose 1969 The Giant Is Awakened he made his recording debut.
more...Overton Amos Lemons (July 5, 1913 – October 7, 1966), known as Smiley Lewis, was an American New Orleans rhythm and blues singer and guitarist. The music journalist Tony Russell wrote that “Lewis was the unluckiest man in New Orleans. He hit on a formula for slow-rocking, small-band numbers like ‘The Bells Are Ringing’ and ‘I Hear You Knocking‘ only to have Fats Domino come up behind him with similar music with a more ingratiating delivery. Lewis was practically drowned in Domino’s backwash.”
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The beautiful Trifid Nebula is a cosmicstudy in contrasts. Also known as M20, it lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula richconstellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid does illustrate three different types of astronomical nebulae; red emission nebulae dominated by light from hydrogen atoms, blue reflection nebulae produced by dust reflecting starlight, and dark nebulae where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette. But the red emission region, roughly separated into three parts by obscuring dust lanes, is what lends the Trifid its popular name. Pillars and jets sculpted by newborn stars, above and right of the emission nebula’s center, appear in famous Hubble Space Telescope close-up images of the region. The Trifid Nebula is about 40 light-years across. Too faint to be seen by the unaided eye, it almost covers the area of a full moon on planet Earth’s sky. 
William Harrison Withers Jr. (July 4, 1938 – March 30, 2020 Slab Fork, WV) was an American singer and songwriter. He had several hits over a career spanning 18 years, including “Ain’t No Sunshine” (1971), “Grandma’s Hands” (1971), “Use Me” (1972), “Lean on Me” (1972), “Lovely Day” (1977) and “Just the Two of Us” (1980). Withers won three Grammy Awards and was nominated for six more.
more...Stephen Collins Foster (July 4, 1826 – January 13, 1864), known as “the father of American music”, was an American composer known primarily for his parlour and minstrelmusic during the Romantic period. He wrote more than 200 songs, including “Oh! Susanna“, “Hard Times Come Again No More“, “Camptown Races“, “Old Folks at Home” (“Swanee River”), “My Old Kentucky Home“, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair“, “Old Black Joe“, and “Beautiful Dreamer“, and many of his compositions remain popular today.
more...Fred Wesley (born July 4, 1943 Columbus, GA) is an American trombonist who worked with James Brown in the 1960s and 1970s, and Parliament-Funkadelic in the second half of the 1970s.
more...Messier 78 or M78, also known as NGC 2068, is a reflection nebula in the constellation Orion. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1780 and included by Charles Messier in his catalog of comet-like objects that same year. 1300ly
Thomas Joseph Tedesco (July 3, 1930 – November 10, 1997) was an American guitarist and studio musician in Los Angeles and Hollywood. He was part of the loose collective of the area’s leading session musicians later popularly known as The Wrecking Crew, who played on thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s, including several hundred Top 40 hits.
more...Lonnie Smith (July 3, 1942 – September 28, 2021), styled Dr. Lonnie Smith, was an American jazz Hammond B3 organist who was a member of the George Bensonquartet in the 1960s. He recorded albums with saxophonist Lou Donaldson for Blue Note before being signed as a solo act. He owned the label Pilgrimage, and was named the year’s best organist by the Jazz Journalists Association nine times.
more...Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies this 5 million year old star cluster NGC 602. Surrounded by its birth shell of gas and dust, star cluster NGC 602 is featured in this stunning Hubble image, augmented in a rollover by images in the X-ray by the Chandra Observatory and in the infrared by Spitzer Telescope. Fantastic ridges and swept back gas strongly suggest that energetic radiation and shock waves from NGC 602‘s massive young stars have eroded the dusty material and triggered a progression of star formation moving away from the star cluster’s center. At the estimated distance of the Small Magellanic Cloud, the featured picture spans about 200 light-years, but a tantalizing assortment of background galaxies are also visible in this sharp view. The background galaxies are hundreds of millions of light-years — or more — beyond NGC 602.
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