mick laBriola

This Picture of the Week shows the brightly coloured Gum 3 nebula as seen with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Attentive viewers may find that part of Gum 3 resembles a Koi fish in this VST image. Equipped with the OmegaCAM instrument, an enormous 268-megapixel camera, the telescope is designed to survey large areas of the southern sky in visible light and take stunning images like this one. Gum 3 is an interstellar cloud of gas and dust located about 3600 light-years away, between the Monoceros and Canis Major constellations. It is named after Colin Stanley Gum, an Australian astronomer who catalogued 84 nebulae in the southern sky.  When the intense ultraviolet radiation from nearby young stars hits hydrogen atoms in the cloud, they emit visible light at very specific colours, which we see as shades of red and pink in the image. At the same time, tiny particles of dust within the cloud reflect starlight, especially blue colours, similar to what makes the sky look blue here on Earth. This play of colours makes nebulae like this spectacular to look at. This image shows not only colour, but also the lack of it. Look closely at the area just right of the brightest part of the cloud  — right of the pink “Koi-smic fish”. Does anything look odd to you? It’s not that there really are fewer stars in this dark area; instead, there is a big clump of dust that blocks part of the visible light, hiding the stars from VST and us.

Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 – January 10, 1976 Hines, Ill), better known by his stage name

Howlin’ Wolf, was an American blues singer and guitarist. He was at the forefront of transforming acoustic Delta blues into electric Chicago blues, and over a four-decade career, recorded blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and psychedelic rock. He is regarded as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time.

Born into poverty in Mississippi as one of six children, he went through a rough childhood where his mother kicked him out of her house, and he moved in with his great-uncle, who was particularly abusive. He then ran away to his father’s house where he finally found a happy family, and in the early 1930s became a protégé of legendary Delta blues guitarist and singer Charley Patton. He started a solo career in the Deep South, playing with other notable blues musicians of the era, and at the end of a decade had made a name for himself in the Mississippi Delta.

After going through some legal issues and spending some time in jail and a particularly rough experience while serving in the Army, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, in adulthood and became successful. He started his recording career in 1951 after being heard singing by 19-year-old Ike Turner, and then formed his own band in Chicago. Five of his songs got on the Billboard national R&B charts. He released several albums in the 1960s and 1970s, and made several television performances. His studio albums include The Howlin’ Wolf Album (1969), Message to the Young (1971), and The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (1971). He released his final album The Back Door Wolf in 1973, and made his last public performance in November 1975 with fellow blues legend B.B. King. After years of severely declining health, Burnett died in 1976. He was posthumously inducted in the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

With a booming voice and imposing physical presence, he is one of the best-known Chicago blues artists. AllMusic has described him as “a primal, ferocious blues belter with a roster of classics rivaling anyone else, and a sandpaper growl of a voice that has been widely imitated”. The musician and critic Cub Kodanoted, “no one could match Howlin’ Wolf for the singular ability to rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits.” Producer Sam Phillips recalled, “When I heard Howlin’ Wolf, I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.'” Several of his songs, including “Smokestack Lightnin’“, “Killing Floor” and “Spoonful“, have become blues and blues rockstandards. “Smokestack Lightnin'” was selected for a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999, and three of his songs were listed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”.In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 54 on its list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time“.

June 9th 2011 Ivy Morrison and mick

Remnants from a star that exploded thousands of years ago created an astonishing spectacle seen here. Officially known as NGC 2736, it is part of the huge Vela supernova remnant and its linear appearance triggered its popular name, the Pencil Nebula. The nebula’s shape suggests that the shock wave which followed the star explosion encountered a region of dense gas, causing the nebula to glow and appear like a rippled sheet. Some regions are dominated by ionized oxygen atoms which glow blue in the picture, yet other regions of mostly hydrogen and are seen emitting red in the image….

Close to 33 hours were utilised to capture the data on my telescope installed in the Deep Sky Chile observatory. Dark skies with good seeing, a fast scope and modern sensors make easy work of capturing pristine data with very few lost subs. I deliberately captured a lot of data on Oxygen III and Hydrogen Alpha to better illustrate what is mentioned above. Image processing has progressed leap and bounds in the last year and with the myriad of post processing tools now available, constructing the final image was an easy task.

Jack Leroy Wilson Jr. (June 9, 1934 – January 21, 1984) was an American singer of the 1950s and 1960s. He was a prominent figure in the transition of rhythm and blues into soul. Nicknamed “Mr. Excitement”, he was considered a master showman and one of the most dynamic singers and performers in soul, R&B, and rock and roll history. He was born in Highland Park, an enclave of Detroit.

Wilson gained initial fame as a member of the R&B vocal group Billy Ward and His Dominoes. He went solo in 1957 and scored over 50 chart singles spanning the genres of R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, doo-wop, and easy listening. This included 16 Top 10 R&B hits, six of which ranked as number ones. On the BillboardHot 100, Wilson scored 14 top 20 pop hits, six of which reached the top 10. In 1975, Wilson suffered a heart attack during a performance, which left him in a minimally conscious state until his death in 1984.

Wilson was posthumously inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.^[3] He is also inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame. Two of Wilson’s recordings were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. He was honored with the Legacy Tribute Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundationin 2003.^[4] In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Wilson No. 69 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and placed him on their list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time (2023). NPR named him one of the 50 Great Voices.

Jack Leroy Wilson Jr. was born on June 9, 1934, in Highland Park, Michigan, as the third and only surviving child of singer Jack Leroy Wilson, Sr. (1903–1983) and Eliza Mae Wilson (1900–1975). Eliza Mae was born on the Billups-Whitfield Place in Lowndes County, Mississippi. Eliza Mae’s parents were Tom and Virginia Ransom. Wilson often visited his family in Columbus and was greatly influenced by the choir at Billups Chapel. Growing up in the suburban Detroit enclave of Highland Park, Wilson joined a gang called the Shakers and often got himself in trouble. Wilson’s alcoholic father was frequently absent and usually unemployed. In 1943, his parents separated shortly after Jackie’s ninth birthday.

Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009), known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid-bodyelectric guitar, and his prototype, called the Log, served as inspiration for the Gibson Les Paul. Paul taught himself how to play guitar, and while he is mainly known for jazz and popular music, he had an early career in country music. In the 1950s, he and his wife, singer and guitarist Mary Ford, recorded numerous records, selling millions of copies.

Paul is credited with many recording innovations. His early experiments with overdubbing (also known as sound on sound), delay effects such as tape delay, phasing, and multitrack recording were among the first to attract widespread attention. His licks, trills, chording sequences, fretting techniques, and timing set him apart from his contemporaries and inspired many guitarists of the present day.

Among his many honors, Paul is one of a handful of artists with a permanent exhibit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is prominently named by the music museum on its website as an “architect” and a “key inductee” with Sam Phillips and Alan Freed. Paul is the only inductee in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Paul was born Lester William Polsfuss in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to George and Evelyn (Stutz) Polsfuss, both of German ancestry. His only sibling, Ralph, was seven years older. Paul’s mother was related to the founders of Milwaukee’s Valentin Blatz Brewing Company and the makers of the Stutzautomobile. His parents divorced when he was a child. His mother simplified their Prussian family name first to Polfuss, then to Polfus, although Les Paul never legally changed his name. Before taking the stage name Les Paul, he performed as Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red.

This deep field mosaicked image presents a stunning view of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam. Also dubbed Pandora’s Cluster, Abell 2744 itself appears to be a ponderous merger of three different massive galaxy clusters. It lies some 3.5 billion light-years away, toward the constellation Sculptor. Dominated by dark matter, the mega-cluster warps and distorts the fabric of spacetime, gravitationally lensingeven more distant objects. Redder than the Pandora cluster galaxies many of the lensed sources are very distant galaxies in the early Universe, their lensed images stretched and distorted into arcs. Of course distinctive diffraction spikes mark foreground Milky Way stars. At the Pandora Cluster’s estimated distance this cosmic box spans about 6 million light-years. But don’t panic. You can explore the tantalizing region in a 2 minute video tour.