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NGC 4676, or the Mice Galaxies, are two spiral galaxies in the constellation Coma Berenices. About 290 million light-years away, they began the process of colliding and merging. Their name refers to the long tails produced by tidal action—the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy—known here as a galactic tide. It is a possibility that both galaxies, which are members of the Coma cluster, have experienced collision, and will continue colliding until they coalesce.

The colors of the galaxy are peculiar. In NGC 4676A a core with some dark markings is surrounded by a bluish white remnant of spiral arms. The tail is unusual, starting out blue and terminating in a more yellowish color, despite the fact that the beginning of each arm in virtually every spiral galaxy starts yellow and terminates in a bluish color. NGC 4676B has a yellowish core and two arcs; arm remnants underneath are bluish as well.

Gary Robert McFarland (October 23, 1933 – November 3, 1971) was a composer, arranger, vibraphonist and vocalist, prominent on Verve and Impulse! Records during the 1960s, when he made “one of the more significant contributors to orchestral jazz”.

McFarland was born in Los Angeles, on October 23, 1933, but grew up in Grants Pass, Oregon.

He attained a small following after working with Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Johnny Hodges, John Lewis, Stan Getz, Bob Brookmeyer, and Anita O’Day.

As well as his own albums and arrangements for other musicians he composed the scores to the films Eye of the Devil (1966) and Who Killed Mary What’s ‘Er Name? (1971). By the end of the 1960s, he was moving away from jazz towards an often wistful or melancholy style of instrumental pop, as well as producing the recordings of other artists on his Skye Records label (run in partnership with Gábor Szabó and Cal Tjader until its bankruptcy in 1970).

Frank Hewitt (October 23, 1935 – September 5, 2002) was an American hard bop jazz pianist.

Born in Queens, New York, Hewitt lived most of his life in Harlem. His mother was a church pianist, and he initially studied classical and gospel music, but switched to jazz after hearing a Charlie Parker record. He took the bop pianists Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Elmo Hope as his role models. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked with Howard McGhee, Cecil Payne, John Coltrane, Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, among others; in 1961 he also participated in the Living Theater‘s production of Jack Gelber‘s The Connection. He became a regular figure in the circle of the pianist Barry Harris. In the 1990s Hewitt became a central figure at New York’s Smalls Jazz Club; aside from playing there several nights a week, he sometimes also ended up using the walk-in refrigerator as a place to bunk when times were rough.

William “Sonny” Criss (23 October 1927 – 19 November 1977) was an American jazz musician.

An alto saxophonist of prominence during the bebop era of jazz, he was one of many players influenced by Charlie Parker.

William Criss was born in Memphis, Tennessee and moved to Los Angeles at the age of 15. He then went on to play in various bands including Howard McGhee‘s, which also featured Charlie Parker.

Criss had developed his own, concise, bluesy tone by this point, and though his basic style did not vary much, his ability on the instrument continued to develop. Nevertheless, he continued to drift from band to band, and played on some records with Johnny Otis and Billy Eckstine.

His first major break came in 1947, on a number of jam sessions arranged by jazz impresario Norman Granz. In 1956 he signed to Imperial Records, based in New York, and recorded a series albums including Jazz U.S.A , Go Man! and Sonny Criss Plays Cole Porter featuring pianist Sonny Clark. Capitol, which owned the master recordings, reissued them as a 2-CD set on their Blue Note imprint in 2000. Criss also recorded At the Crossroadswith pianist Wynton Kelly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaGtbdJZkaM&index=3&list=PLKAZion_8BHIihbxDS8QGZQkYheoOARhw

The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation Circinus. This galaxy is designated a type 2 Seyfert, a class of mostly spiral galaxies that have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes. Seyfert galaxies are themselves part of a larger class of objects called Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN. AGN have the ability to remove gas from the centers of their galaxies by blowing it out into space at phenomenal speeds. Astronomers studying the Circinus galaxy are seeing evidence of a powerful AGN at the center of this galaxy as well. Much of the gas in the disk of the Circinus spiral is concentrated in two specific rings — a larger one of diameter 1,300 light-years, which has already been observed by ground-based telescopes, and a previously unseen ring of diameter 260 light-years. In the Hubble image, the smaller inner ring is located on the inside of the green disk. The larger outer ring extends off the image and is in the plane of the galaxy’s disk. Both rings are home to large amounts of gas and dust as well as areas of major “starburst” activity, where new stars are rapidly forming on timescales of 40 – 150 million years, much shorter than the age of the entire galaxy. At the center of the starburst rings is the Seyfert nucleus, the believed signature of a supermassive black hole that is accreting surrounding gas and dust. The black hole and its accretion disk are expelling gas out of the galaxy’s disk and into its halo (the region above and below the disk). The detailed structure of this gas is seen as magenta-colored streamers extending towards the top of the image. In the center of the galaxy and within the inner starburst ring is a V-shaped structure of gas. The structure appears whitish-pink in this composite image, made up of four filters. Two filters capture the narrow lines from atomic transitions in oxygen and hydrogen; two wider filters detect green and near-infrared light. In the narrow-band filters, the V-shaped structure is very pronounced. This region, which is the projection of a three-dimensional cone extending from the nucleus to the galaxy’s halo, contains gas that has been heated by radiation emitted by the accreting black hole. A “counter-cone,” believed to be present, is obscured from view by dust in the galaxy’s disk. Ultraviolet radiation emerging from the central source excites nearby gas causing it to glow. The excited gas is beamed into the oppositely directed cones like two giant searchlights. Located near the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy, the Circinus galaxy is partially hidden by intervening dust along our line of sight. As a result, the galaxy went unnoticed until about 25 years ago. This Hubble image was taken on April 10, 1999 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The research team, led by Andrew S. Wilson of the University of Maryland, is using these visible light images along with near-infrared data to further understand the dynamics of this powerful galaxy.

Jan Gunnar Hoff (born 22 October 1958 in Bodø) is a Norwegian jazz pianist, composer, arranger and professor, living in Bodø, known from cooperations with jazz musicians like Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Lars Danielsson, John Surman, Karin Krog, Maria Joao, Marilyn Mazur, Anders Jormin, Arve Henriksen, Per Jørgensen, Alex Acuna, Mike Stern, Ernst-Wiggo Sandbakk, Per Mathisen, Arild Andersen, Nils Petter Molvær, Ståle Storløkken, Audun Kleive and Mathias Eick.

Cyril “Midnight” Blake (22 October 1900 – 3 December 1951) was a Trinidadian jazz trumpeter.

Blake moved to England about 1918, where he played in a British group called the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. He worked in Paris and London as a musician throughout the 1920s, and in the 1930s played in the bands of Leon Abbey, Happy Blake, Rudolph Dunbar, Leslie Thompson, Joe Appleton, and Lauderic Caton. In 1938 he formed his own band, which was centred on Jig’s Club in London; he recorded several times with this ensemble. In the 1940s Blake led his band behind Lord Kitchener for recordings on Parlophone Records, playing in a calypso style. Late in his life he returned to Trinidad, where he continued to lead bands. He died of an illness in 1951.

This image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 4151, located at a distance of about 45 million light years from us. NGC 4151 is a Seyfert galaxy and hosts one of the brightest active galactic nuclei (AGN) known at X-ray wavelengths. The super-massive black hole lying at the center of NGC 4151 has a mass of about 50 million solar masses.

The small spiral to the bottom right of 4151 is NGC 4156 Notice the tidal tail, as well as the small galaxy to the upper left with some tidal features as well.

Telescope: Planewave 24″ f6.7 on a Planewave HD Mount Camera: SBIG 16803

Location: Stellar Winds Observatory at DSNM, Animas, New Mexico

Exposure: LRGB 450L, 240 each RGB

Manfred Mann (born Manfred Sepse Lubowitz, 21 October 1940 in Johannesburg, Transvaal, Union of South Africa) is a British keyboard player, guitarist, and vocalist, born in South Africa, who became best known as a founding member and namesake of the bands Manfred Mann, Manfred Mann Chapter Three and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.

Lubowitz was raised in a Jewish family in Johannesburg, South Africa, the son of David Lubowitz and Alma Cohen. He studied music at the University of the Witwatersrand, and worked as a jazz pianist at a number of clubs in Johannesburg. Between 1959 and 1961 he and his childhood friend Saul Ozynski recorded two albums as the Vikings – South Africa’s first rock and roll band.

Úrsula Hilaria Celia Caridad Cruz Alfonso (October 21, 1925 – July 16, 2003) was a Cuban singer and the most popular Latin artist of the 20th century, gaining twenty-three gold albums during her career. She received a star in the “Walk Of Fame” in Hollywood. The U.S. President Bill Clintonawarded her the National Medal of Arts in 1994. She was renowned internationally as the “Queen of Salsa”, “La Guarachera de Cuba”, as well as “The Queen of Latin Music”.

She spent much of her career working in the United States and several Latin American countries. Leila Cobo of Billboard Magazine once said “Cruz is indisputably the best known and most influential female figure in the history of Cuban and Latin music“. She was an ambassador for the variety and vitality of the music of her native Havana, and after the Cuban revolution she became a symbol of artistic freedom for Cuban American exiles. She died of brain cancer in 2003.

Úrsula Hilaria Celia Caridad Cruz Alfonso was born on October 21, 1925 in the diverse, working-class neighborhood of Santos Suárez in Havana, Cuba, the second of four children. Her father, Simón Cruz, was a railroad stoker and her mother, Catalina Alfonso was a homemaker who took care of an extended family. Celia was one of the eldest among fourteen children- brothers, sisters, and many cousins- she often had to put the younger ones to bed by singing them to sleep.

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie (/ɡɪˈlɛspi/; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and singer.

Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge^[2] but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality provided some of bebop’s most prominent symbols.

In the 1940s Gillespie, with Charlie Parker, became a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Jon Faddis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Chuck Mangione, and balladeer Johnny Hartman.

Carlos Wesley “Don” Byas (October 21, 1912 – August 24, 1972) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist, most associated with bebop. He played with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, and also led his own band. He lived in Europe for the last 26 years of his life.

Byas was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Both of Byas’ parents were musicians. His mother played the piano, and his father, the clarinet. Byas started his training in classical music, learning to play violin, clarinet and alto saxophone, which he played until the end of the 1920s.

Benny Carter, who played many instruments, was his idol at this time. Byas started playing in local orchestras at the age of 17, with Bennie Moten, Terrence Holder and Walter Page. He founded and led his own college band, Don Carlos and His Collegiate Ramblers, during 1931-32, at Langston College, Oklahoma.

Byas switched to the tenor saxophone after he moved to the West Coast and played with several Los Angeles bands. In 1933, he took part in a West coast tour of Bert Johnson’s Sharps and Flats. He worked in Lionel Hampton‘s band at the Paradise Club in 1935 along with the reed player and arranger Eddie Barefield and trombonist Tyree Glenn. He also played with Buck Clayton, Lorenzo Flennoy and Charlie Echols.

Not a Falcon 9 rocket launch after sunset, the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its haunting symmetries are seen in the very central region of this composited picture, processed to reveal an enormous but extremely faint halo of gaseous material, over three light-years across. Made with data from ground- and space-based telescopes it shows the extended emission which surrounds the brighter, familiar planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. But only more recently have some planetaries been found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier active episodes in the star’s evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years old.