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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.
Imam Mohammad Ahmad Eissa (Arabic: إمام محمد أحمد عيسى) or Sheikh Imam (Arabic: الشيخ إمام; July 2, 1918 – June 6, 1995) was a famous Egyptian composer and singer. For most of his life, he formed a duo with the famous Egyptian colloquial poet Ahmed Fouad Negm. Together, they were known for their political songs in favor of the poor and the working classes.
more...Ahmad Jamal (born Frederick Russell Jones; July 2, 1930 – April 16, 2023) was an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and educator. For six decades, he was one of the most successful small-group leaders in jazz. He was a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Jazz Master and won a Lifetime Achievement Grammyfor his contributions to music history.
Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 2, 1930.He began playing piano at the age of three, when his uncle Lawrence challenged him to duplicate what he was playing. Jamal began formal piano training at the age of seven with Mary Cardwell Dawson, whom he said greatly influenced him. His Pittsburgh roots remained an important part of his identity (“Pittsburgh meant everything to me and it still does,” he said in 2001) and it was there that he was immersed in the influence of jazz artists such as Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner. Jamal studied with pianist James Miller and began playing piano professionally at the age of fourteen, at which point he was recognized as a “coming great” by the pianist Art Tatum. When asked about his practice habits by a critic from The New York Times, Jamal commented that, “I used to practice and practice with the door open, hoping someone would come by and discover me. I was never the practitioner in the sense of twelve hours a day, but I always thought about music. I think about music all the time.
more...I love reggae and have spent over 30 years performing and producing this music. Some criticize it and do not accept it as a viable musical genre. However the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNSECO has designated reggae music as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.” It is a voice of the people much like folk, punk, blues, jazz and so many voices in harmony across the world!
This is a small contribution of mine.
Around 11 000 years ago a massive star ended its life in a powerful explosion, known as a supernova. During explosions like this, shock waves ripple out through the surrounding gas, compressing it into intricate thread-like structures. The energy that’s released during a supernova then heats these threads, causing them to shine brightly. The result is what we can see in this Picture of the Week: the Vela supernova remnant.
This picture is just a small chunk of a much larger image, taken with the OmegaCAM instrument on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), which is hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. At only 800 light-years from Earth, the Vela supernova remnant is one of the closest examples of these dramatic events. Thanks to its proximity we can study this object in great detail, to help us understand what happens when massive stars reach the end of their life in spectacular fashion.
Deborah Ann Harry (born Angela Trimble; July 1, 1945) is an American singer, songwriter and actress, best known as the lead vocalist of the band Blondie. Four of her songs with the band reached No. 1 on the US charts between 1979 and 1981.
Born in Miami, Florida, Harry was adopted as an infant and raised in Hawthorne, New Jersey. After college she worked various jobs—as a dancer, a Playboy Bunny, and a secretary (including at the BBC in New York)—before her breakthrough in the music industry. She co-formed Blondie in 1974 in New York City. The band released its eponymous debut studio album in 1976 and released three more studio albums between then and 1979, including Parallel Lines, which spawned six singles, including “Heart of Glass“. Their fifth studio album, Autoamerican (1980), produced hits such as a cover of “The Tide Is High“, and “Rapture“, which is considered the first rap song to chart at number one in the United States.
Harry released her debut solo studio album, KooKoo, in 1981. During a Blondie hiatus, she embarked on an acting career, appearing in lead roles in the neo-noir Union City(1980) and in David Cronenberg‘s body horror film Videodrome (1983). She released her second solo studio album, 1986’s Rockbird, and starred in John Waters‘s cult dance film Hairspray (1988). She released two more solo albums between then and 1993, before returning to film with roles in a John Carpenter-directed segment of the horror film Body Bags (1993), and in the drama Heavy (1995).
Blondie reunited in the late 1990s, releasing No Exit (1999), followed by The Curse of Blondie (2003). Harry continued to appear in independent films throughout the 2000s, including Deuces Wild (2002), My Life Without Me (2003) and Elegy (2008). With Blondie, she released the group’s ninth studio album, Panic of Girls, in 2011, followed by Ghosts of Download (2014). The band’s eleventh studio album, 2017’s Pollinator, charted at number 4 in the United Kingdom.
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