mick laBriola

NGC 1893 is an open cluster in the constellation Auriga. It is about 12,400 light years away. The star cluster is embedded in the Tadpole Nebula (HII region IC 410).

Stephen Lawrence Winwood (born 12 May 1948) is an English musician and songwriter whose genres include blue-eyed soul, rhythm and blues, blues rock and pop rock. Though primarily a guitarist, keyboard player and vocalist, prominent for his distinctive soulful high tenor voice, Winwood plays other instruments proficiently, including drums, mandolin, bass and saxophone.

Winwood achieved fame during the 1960s and 1970s as an integral member of three major bands: the Spencer Davis Group (1964–1967), Traffic (1967–1969 and 1970–1974) and Blind Faith (1969). During the 1980s, his solo career flourished and he had a number of hit singles, including “While You See a Chance” (1980) from the album Arc of a Diver and “Valerie” (1982) from Talking Back to the Night (“Valerie” became a hit when it was re-released with a remix from Winwood’s 1987 compilation album Chronicles). His 1986 album Back in the High Life marked his career zenith, with hit singles including “Back in the High Life Again“, “The Finer Things“, and the US Billboard Hot 100 number one hit “Higher Love“. He found the top of the Hot 100 again with “Roll with It” (1988) from the album of the same name, with “Holding On” also charting highly the same year. Although his hit singles ceased after the 1980s, he continued to release new albums up to 2008, when Nine Lives, his latest album, was released.

In 2004, Winwood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Traffic. He has won two Grammy Awards and an Ivor Novello Award, and has been honored as BMI Icon. In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked Winwood number 33 on its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

The Merope Nebula (also known as Tempel’s Nebula and NGC 1435) is a diffuse reflection nebulain the Pleiades star cluster, surrounding the 4th magnitude star Merope. It was discovered on October 19, 1859 by the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel. The discovery was made using a 10.5 cm refractor. John Herschel included it as 768 in his General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars but never observed it himself.

The Merope Nebula has an apparent magnitude starting at 13 and quickly dimming by a factor of about 15, making most of the nebula dimmer than magnitude 16. It is illuminated entirely by the star Merope, which is embedded in the nebula. It contains a bright knot, IC 349, about half an arcminute wide near Merope, which was discovered by Edward Emerson Barnard in November 1890. It is naturally very bright but is almost hidden in the radiance of Merope. It appears blue in photographs because of the fine carbon dust spread throughout the cloud. Though it was once thought the Pleiades formed from this and surrounding nebulae, it is now known that the Pleiades nebulosity is caused by a chance encounter with the cloud.

Serpens South is a relatively dense star cluster of about 7 x 10 light-years in diameter, located approximately 848 light-years away from Earth in the southern portion of the Serpens cloud, a star-forming molecular cloud in the constellation of Serpens (the Snake), which also hosts the famous and massive Serpens star cluster.

Human families may be bonded by blood, but stellar families are united by gravity. A family of stars, or star cluster, can contain hundreds or thousands of members. The Serpens South star cluster contains some 50 young stars – “siblings” – 35 of which are protostars, or stellar infants, that are just beginning to form. This star cluster was uncovered by infrared observations of the Spitzer Space Telescope. At visible wavelengths the stars are completely obscured by interstellar dust in the Serpens cloud.

The discovery of Serpens South is a direct result of the Gould’s Belt Legacy project, which aims to study all prominent star-forming regions within about 1,600 light-years of Earth. These regions together form a ring of molecular clouds and associated young stars known as the Gould’s Belt. The discovery will lead astronomers to more clues about how these cosmic families, which contain hundreds of gravitationally bound stars, form and interact.

In this image, the Serpens South stars are shown as green, yellow, and orange specks, sitting atop a black line that runs through the middle of the image. The “line” is a long, dense patch of cosmic dust and gas, which is currently condensing to form stars. Stars form when thick cosmic clouds collapse. Tints of green represent hot hydrogen gas. Spitzer can see this hydrogen gas “fingerprint” when the high-speed jets shooting out of the young stars violently collide with cool gas in the surrounding cloud. Wisps of red in the background are organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). On Earth, PAHs are found on charred barbeque grills and in sooty automobile exhaust.

This picture is composed of three images taken on August 8, 2007 with the Spitzer Space telescope’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) at 3.6 (blue), 4.5 (green), and 5.8 (red) microns. North is up.

Lowell Fillmore “Sly” Dunbar (born 10 May 1952, Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican drummer, best known as one half of the prolific Jamaican rhythm section and reggae production duo Sly and Robbie.

Dunbar began playing at 15 in a band called The Yardbrooms. His first appearance on a recording was on the Dave and Ansell Collins album Double Barrel. Dunbar joined a band Ansell Collins called Skin, Flesh and Bones.

Speaking on his influences, Sly explains “My mentor was the drummer for the Skatalites, Lloyd Knibb. And I used to listen a lot to the drummer for Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Al Jackson Jr., and a lot of Philadelphia. And there are other drummers in Jamaica, like Santa and Carly from the Wailers Band, Winston Bennett, Paul Douglas, Mikey Boo. I respect all these drummers and have learnt a lot from them. From them, I listened and created my own style. They played some things I copied, other things I recreated.”

In 1972, Dunbar met and became friends with Robbie Shakespeare, who was then bass guitarist for the Hippy Boys. Shakespeare recommended Dunbar to Bunny Lee as a possible session drummer for the Aggrovators. Dunbar and Shakespeare decided to continue performing together. They worked with Peter Tosh and his band until 1981, recording five albums.

Dunbar noted about the Mighty Diamonds‘ song “Right Time”: “When that tune first come out, because of that double tap on the rim nobody believe it was me on the drums, they thought it was some sort of sound effect we was using. Then when it go to number 1 and stay there, everybody started trying for that style and it soon become established.” According to The Independent, the entire album Right Time was “revolutionary”, the breakthrough album of “masters of groove and propulsion” Dunbar and Shakespeare, with “Sly’s radical drumming matching the singers’ insurrectionary lyrics blow-for-blow.”

Dunbar and Shakespeare formed their Taxi Records label in 1980. It has seen releases from many international successful artists, including Black Uhuru, Chaka Demus and Pliers, Ini Kamoze, Beenie Man and Red Dragon.