mick laBriola

NGC 5395 and 5394, together known as Arp 84 or the Heron Galaxy, are two interacting galaxies located just over 160 million light-years away from Earth in the small northern constellation of Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs). It takes little imagination to see a blue heron’s body, complete with neck, head and a beak reaching out to a nearby fish.

The larger, NGC 5395, is a somewhat elongated, nearly face-on spiral galaxy of about 140 thousand light-years across, located about 162 million light-years away from Earth, while it receding from us at approximately 3511 kilometers per second. NGC 5394, also face-on galaxy, is a barred spiral of about 90 thousand light-years across, located 161 million light-years away, while it is receding from us at approximately 3448 kilometers per second.

The main disk of NGC 5395, with a bright, elongated central region, is asymmetric and distorted due to interaction with its nearby companion NGC 5294. The dominant spiral arm of this two-armed spiral galaxy forms a large ring somewhat off center with respect to the nucleus. Obscuring dust lanes can be seen throughout the galaxy.

The smaller galaxy, NGC 5394, has an oval disk, two long, fairly symmetric, open tidal arms, and very bright inner spiral arms, disjoint from the outer tidal arms. Most of the gas in NGC 5394 is concentrated around the center, so is suitable for fueling the ongoing starburst in its center. Despite the presence of hydrogen gas, two of the three inner spiral arms of NGC 5394 show no evidence of ongoing star formation.

On June 25, 2000 the Type Ic supernova SN 2000cr was discovered in NGC 5395, northeast of the nucleus.

Types Ic (and Ib) supernovae are caused by the core collapse of massive stars and are usually referred to as stripped core-collapse supernovae. These stars have shed (or been stripped of) their outer envelope of hydrogen, and lack the absorption line of silicon. Compared to Type Ib, Type Ic supernovae have lost more of their initial envelope, including most of their helium.

Norman Blake (born March 10, 1938) is a traditional American stringed instrument artist and songwriter.

Blake was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in Sulphur Springs, Alabama. He listened to old-time and country music on the radio by the Carter Family, the Skillet Lickers, Roy Acuff, and the Monroe Brothers (Charlie and Bill Monroe). He learned guitar at age 11 or 12, then mandolin, dobro, and fiddle in his teens. When he was 16, he dropped out of school to play music professionally.

In the 1950s, Blake joined the Dixieland Drifters and performed on radio broadcasts, then joined the Lonesome Travelers. When he was drafted in 1961, he served as an Army radio operator in the Panama Canal Zone. He started a popular band known as the Kobbe Mountaineers. A year later, while he was on leave, he recorded the album Twelve Shades of Bluegrass with the Lonesome Travelers.

John Donald “Don” Abney (March 10, 1923 – January 20, 2000) was an American jazz pianist.

Abney was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied piano and french horn at the Manhattan School of Music, and he played the latter in an Army band during military service.

After returning from the army he played in ensembles with Wilbur de Paris, Bill Harris, Kai Winding, Chuck Wayne, Sy Oliver, and Louis Bellson. He had a sustained career as a session musician, playing on recordings for Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Oscar Pettiford, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, and Pearl Bailey. He also played on a large number of recordings for more minor musicians and on R&B, pop, rock, and doo wopreleases.

The Cigar Galaxy is the archetypal starburst galaxy, having experienced two recent spates of star formation. One occurred10 million years ago in its nucleus, and another sprang up 5 million years ago in a ring around the galaxy’s core. This froth of starbirth drives a so-called galactic superwind: dust, gas, and radiation that flow out of the galaxy and into intergalactic space.

To observe this wind, Terry Jay Jones (University of Minnesota) and colleagues applied for time on NASA’s SOFIA airborne observatory, which soars above much of the atmosphere that would absorb the infrared light it’s designed to collect. A modified Boeing 747 flies the 2.7-meter telescope in whatever careening trajectories are necessary to best view its targets that night.

Jones and colleagues used the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-plus (HAWC+) instrument aboard SOFIA to observe far-infrared light (at wavelengths of 53 and 154 microns) coming from the Cigar Galaxy. Hot dust within giant, gaseous star-factory clouds emits this light. But dust isn’t perfectly spherical; dust grains tend to be oblong, and they tend to align with the ambient magnetic field that threads the galaxy. So the emission from these dust grains is polarized in a way that tells astronomers which way the magnetic field is pointing.

What Jones’s team found was that within 2,000 light-years of the galaxy’s center, the wind that charges into intergalactic space carries the galaxy’s magnetic field along with it. The polarization in the image above shows that the magnetic field is pretty much vertical in this central region. Outside this region, the magnetic field is horizontal, threading the plane of the galaxy.

Zakir Hussain (born 9 March 1951) is a tabla virtuoso, composer, percussionist, music producer, film actor and eldest son of legendary tabla player Ustad Allah Rakha.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1988, and the Padma Bhushan in 2002, by the Government of India presented by President Abdul Kalam. He was also awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1990, given by the Sangeet Natak Academy, India’s National Academy of Music, Dance & Drama. In 1999, he was awarded the United States National Endowment for the Arts‘ National Heritage Fellowship, the highest award given to traditional artists and musicians.

Zakir Hussain was born March 9, 1951 in a nursing home in Mahim at about 9:45 p.m. on a Friday. Hussain was born to tabla player Alla Rakha. His mother’s name was Bavi Begum. It was said that Hussain was an ‘unlucky’ child since his father was extremely ill around the time of his birth. A short while after his birth, a holy individual by the name of Gyani Baba appeared at Hussain’s house and told his mother to name their son Zakir Hussain. Although their family name is Qureshi, Zakir was given the surname Hussain. Gyani Baba predicted that Zakir would save Allah Rakha. Within four years, Allah Rakha’s health was back to normal. He attended St. Michael’s High School in Mahim, and briefly attended St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.

Dorothy Jacqueline Keely (March 9, 1928 – December 16, 2017), better known as Keely Smith, was an American jazz and popular music singer, who performed and recorded extensively in the 1950s with then-husband Louis Prima, and throughout the 1960s as a solo artist.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Smith was of Irish and Cherokee ancestry. Jesse Smith, her stepfather, was a carpenter, and her mother took in laundry to earn money to buy gowns for Smith to wear when she performed.

When Smith was 11 years old, she sang regularly as a cast member of The Joe Brown Radio Gang program on a Norfolk station. At age 14, Smith sang with a naval air station band led by Saxie Dowell. At 15, she got her first paying job with the Earl Bennett band. She saw Louis Prima perform in New York City in 1949. They recorded together in 1949 and married on July 13, 1953.

Their songs included Johnny Mercer‘s and Harold Arlen‘s “That Old Black Magic,” which was a Top 20 hit in the US in 1958. At the 1st Annual Grammy Awards in 1959, Smith and Prima won the first Grammy for Best Performance by a Vocal Group or Chorus for “That Old Black Magic”. Her deadpan act was popular with fans. The duo followed up with the minor successes “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen“, a revival of the 1937 Andrews Sisters hit.

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9 or 19, 1930– June 11, 2015) was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer. In the 1960s, he was one of the founders of free jazz, a term he invented for his album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His “Broadway Blues” has become a standard and has been cited as an important work in free jazz. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.

Coleman was born in 1930 in Fort Worth, Texas where he was raised.

In 1959 Atlantic released The Shape of Jazz to Come According to music critic Steve Huey, the album “was a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven’t come to grips with.” Jazzwise listed it No. 3 on their list of the 100 best jazz albums of all time.

Coleman’s quartet received a long – and sometimes controversial – engagement at Five Spot jazz club in New York City. Leonard Bernstein, Lionel Hampton, and Modern Jazz Quartet were impressed and offered encouragement. Hampton asked to perform with the quartet; Bernstein helped Haden obtain a composition grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. But trumpeter Miles Davis said Coleman was “all screwed up inside” although he recanted this comment and became a proponent of Coleman’s innovations.

Coleman’s early sound was due in part to his use of a plastic saxophone. He bought a plastic horn in Los Angeles in 1954 because he was unable to afford a metal saxophone, though he didn’t like the sound of the plastic instrument at first.

Interstellar dust clouds and bright nebulae abound in the fertile constellation of Orion. One of the brightest, M78, is near the center in this colorful telescopic view, covering an area north of Orion’s belt. At a distance of about 1,500 light-years, the bluish nebula itself is about 5 light-years across. Its blue tint is due to dust preferentially reflecting the blue light of hot, young stars in the region. Dark dust lanes and other nebulae can easily be traced through the gorgeous skyscape that includes many Herbig- Haro objects, energetic jets from stars in the process of formation. But missing from this image is McNeil’s nebula. A major discovery only recognized in 2004, the enigmatic, variable nebula was found along the dark lane of dust above and right of larger M78. McNeil’s nebula is associated with a protostar and seen to be sometimes present and sometimes absent in photos of the well-imaged region. McNeil’s nebula faded from view late last year and is still absent in this deep image recorded in February 2019.

Gábor István Szabó (March 8, 1936 – February 26, 1982) was a Hungarian American guitarist whose style incorporated jazz, pop, rock, and Hungarian music.

In 1961, Szabo became a member of quintet that was led by Chico Hamilton and included Charles Lloyd, playing what has been described as chamber jazz, with “a moderate avant-gardism”. Szabo was influenced by the rock music of the 1960s, particularly the use of feedback. In 1965 he was in a jazz pop group led by Gary McFarland, then worked again with Lloyd in an energetic quartet with Ron Carter and Tony Williams. The song “Gypsy Queen” from Szabo’s debut solo album Spellbinder became a hit for rock guitarist Carlos Santana. During the late 1960s, Szabo worked in a group with guitarist Jimmy Stewart He started the label Skye Records with McFarland and Cal Tjader.

George Edward Coleman (born March 8, 1935) is an American jazz saxophonist known for his work with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock in the 1960s. In 2015, he was named an NEA Jazz Master.

After working with Ray Charles, Coleman started working with B.B. King in 1953, at which point he switched to tenor saxophone. In 1956 Coleman moved to Chicago, along with Booker Little, where he worked with Gene Ammons and Johnny Griffin before joining Max Roach‘s quintet (1958–1959). Coleman recorded with organist Jimmy Smith on his album Houseparty(1957), along with Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Burrell, and Donald Bailey. Moving to New York City with Max Roach in that year, he went on to play with Slide Hampton (1959–1962), Ron Carter, Jimmy Cobb, and Wild Bill Davis (1962), before joining Miles Davis’ quintet in 1963–1964.

His albums with Davis (and the rhythm section of Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums)) are Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), A Rare Home Town Appearance (1963), Côte Blues (1963), In Europe (1963), My Funny Valentine, and Four & More, both live recordings of a concert in Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York Cityin February 1964. Shortly after this concert, Coleman was replaced by Wayne Shorter. Nevertheless, Davis retained a high opinion of Coleman’s playing, stating that “George played everything almost perfectly…He was a hell of a musician.” Coleman played with Lionel Hampton (1965–1966), also in 1965 on Chet Baker‘s The Prestige Sessions, with Kirk Lightsey, Herman Wright, and Roy Brooks. Clark Terry, Horace Silver, Elvin Jones (1968), Shirley Scott (1972), Cedar Walton (1975), Charles Mingus (1977–1978), Ahmad Jamal (1994, 2000), and many others.

John Smith Hurt (possibly March 8, 1892– November 2, 1966), better known as Mississippi John Hurt, was an American country blues singer and guitarist.

Raised in Avalon, Mississippi, Hurt taught himself to play the guitar around the age of nine. He worked as a sharecropper and began playing at dances and parties, singing to a melodious fingerpicked accompaniment. His first recordings, made for Okeh Records in 1928, were commercial failures, and he continued to work as a farmer.

Dick Spottswood and Tom Hoskins, a blues enthusiast, located Hurt in 1963 and persuaded him to move to Washington, D.C. He was recorded by the Library of Congress in 1964. This helped further the American folk music revival, which led to the rediscovery of many other bluesmen of Hurt’s era. Hurt performed on the university and coffeehouse concert circuit with other Delta blues musicians who were brought out of retirement. He also recorded several albums for Vanguard Records.

Hurt returned to Mississippi, where he died, in Grenada, a year later.

Material recorded by him has been re-released by many record labels. His songs have been recorded by Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Jerry Garcia, Beck, Doc Watson, John McCutcheon, Taj Mahal, Bruce Cockburn, David Johansen, Bill Morrissey, Gillian Welch, Josh Ritter, Chris Smither, Guthrie Thomas, Parsonsfield, and Rory Block. Hurt was born in Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi, and raised in Avalon, Mississippi. He taught himself to play guitar at the age of nine, stealthily playing the guitar of a friend of his mother’s, who often stayed at the Hurt home while courting a woman who lived nearby. As a youth he played old-time music for friends and at dances. He worked as a farmhand and sharecropper into the 1920s.

Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic field of view. The entire scene is a two panel mosaic constructed using narrowband image data, with emission from sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen atoms shown in red, green and blue hues. It’s anchored right and left by two bright stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, at the foot of the celestial twin. The Jellyfish Nebula itself is right of center, the brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. An emission nebula cataloged as Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper left. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be about 300 light-years across.