Sharpless 2-132 is a very faint emission type nebula on the Cepheus/Lacerta border. It lies at a degree southeast of Epsilon Cep, and has a size of about 40 arc minutes.
It is estimated to be about 10,000 to 12,000 light years away… but this is no more than an estimate. It’s a well studied region as well, with lots going on as you can see in the annotated image.
There’s information about the planetary nebula G101.5-00.6, the open Galactic custer called Teutsch 127 as well as the Wolf-Raynet star 153ab.
Fat Larry’s Band was an American R&B and funk band from Philadelphia, which enjoyed some commercial success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly in the United Kingdom.
Formed by drummer and vocalist “Fat” Larry James (August 2, 1949 – December 5, 1987) in 1976, the band included trumpeter/flautist Art Capehart, guitarists Ted Cohen and Tony Middleton, vocalists Freddie Campbell (1952 – January 19, 2013) and Darryl Grant, keyboardist Terry Price, vocalist Alfonso Smith, saxophonist Doug Jones, bassist Larry La Bes, trombonist/alto saxophonist Jimmy Lee, and keyboardist Erskine Williams.
The band’s biggest hits were “Act Like You Know” (which appears on the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City soundtrack) and “Zoom“, which reached number 2 on the UK Singles Chart in October 1982, and number 10 on the Australian Singles Chart. Fat Larry’s Band had three other hits in the UK: “Center City”, “Boogie Town”, and “Lookin’ for Love”.
On December 5, 1987, James died from a heart attack at the age of 38. As a result, the band folded.
The opening drum break from “Down on the Avenue”, from the band’s first album, Feel It (WMOT Records, 1976), has been sampled by many musicians, including N.W.A, Ice-T, Jungle Brothers, Depeche Mode, and Run-D.M.C..
see full post...Nicola James Capaldi (2 August 1944 – 28 January 2005) was an English singer-songwriter and drummer. His musical career spanned more than four decades. He co-founded the progressive rock band Traffic in 1967 with Steve Winwood with whom he co-wrote the majority of the band’s material. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a part of Traffic’s original lineup.
Capaldi also performed with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Alvin Lee, Cat Stevens, and Mylon LeFevre, and wrote lyrics for other artists, such as “Love Will Keep Us Alive” and “This is Reggae Music”. As a solo artist he scored more than a half dozen chart hits in various countries, the best-known being “That’s Love” as well as his cover of “Love Hurts“.
see full post...Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos, known as Naná Vasconcelos (2 August 1944 – 9 March 2016), was a Brazilian percussionist, vocalist and berimbau player, notable for his work as a solo artist on over two dozen albums, and as a backing musician with Pat Metheny, Don Cherry, Björk, Jan Garbarek, Egberto Gismonti, Gato Barbieri, and Milton Nascimento.
Vasconcelos was born in Recife, Brazil. Beginning from 1967 he joined many artists’ works as a percussionist. Among his many collaborations, he contributed to four Jon Hassell albums from 1976 to 1980 (including Possible Musics by Brian Eno and Hassell), and later to several Pat Metheny Group works and Jan Garbarek concerts from early 1980s to early 1990s. In 1984 he appeared on the Pierre Favre album Singing Drums along with Paul Motian. He also appears on Arild Andersen‘s album If You Look Far Enough with Ralph Towner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3mffS8H3Vc
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see full post...This week, we feature an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 4303, also known as Messier 61, which is one of the largest galactic members of the Virgo Cluster. Being a so-called starburst galaxy, it has an unusually high amount of stars being born, and has been used by astronomers as a laboratory to better understand the fascinating phenomena of star formation. Stars form when clouds of cold gas collapse. The energetic radiation from newly born stars will heat and ionise the surrounding remaining gas. The ionised gas will shine, acting as a beacon of ongoing star formation. In this stunning and jewel-like image, this glowing gas can be seen as the whirlpool of gold: the direct traces of stars being born. The golden glow is a result of combining observations taken at different wavelengths of light with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Here gas clouds of ionised oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur are shown in blue, green and red, respectively. The observations are done as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) project, aiming to reveal nearby galaxies across all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Are you curious about how one goes from observations to an image like this one? Check out this ESO blog post that goes into it in more detail of the process.
Robert William Cray (born August 1, 1953) is an American blues guitarist and singer. He has led his own band and won five Grammy Awards.
Robert Cray was born on August 1, 1953, in Columbus, Georgia, while his father was stationed at Fort Benning. Cray’s musical beginnings go back to when he was a student at Denbigh High School in Newport News, Virginia. While there, he played in his first band, The One-Way Street. His family eventually settled in the Tacoma, Washington, area. There, he attended Lakes High School in Lakewood, Washington.
By the age of 20, Cray had seen his heroes Albert Collins, Freddie King and Muddy Waters in concert and decided to form his own band; they began playing college towns on the West Coast. In the late 1970s he lived in Eugene, Oregon, where he formed the Robert Cray Band and collaborated with Curtis Salgado in the Cray-Hawks. In the 1978 film National Lampoon’s Animal House, Cray was the uncredited bassist in the house party band Otis Day and the Knights.
see full post...Jerome John Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was an American musician, best known for being a principal songwriter, the lead guitarist and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, of which he was a founding member and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader of the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead.
As one of its founders, Garcia performed with the Grateful Dead for their entire 30-year career (1965–1995). Garcia also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Saunders–Garcia Band (with longtime friend Merl Saunders), the Jerry Garcia Band, Old & In the Way, the Garcia/Grisman and Garcia/Kahnacoustic duos, Legion of Mary, and New Riders of the Purple Sage (which he co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson). He also released several solo albums, and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician. He was well known for his distinctive guitar playing, and was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone‘s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” cover story in 2003. In the 2015 version of the list he was ranked at #46.
Garcia was also renowned for his musical and technical ability, particularly his ability to play a variety of instruments and sustain long improvisations with the Grateful Dead. Garcia believed that improvisation took stress away from his playing and allowed him to make spur of the moment decisions that he would not have made intentionally. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Garcia noted that “my own preferences are for improvisation, for making it up as I go along. The idea of picking, of eliminating possibilities by deciding, that’s difficult for me”. Originating from the days of the “acid tests”, these improvisations were a form of exploration rather than playing a song already written.
Later in life, Garcia struggled with diabetes and in 1986, went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life. Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he continued to struggle with obesity, smoking, and longstanding heroin and cocaine addictions. He was staying in a California drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack on August 9, 1995, at the age of 53.
Garcia’s ancestors on his father’s side were from Galicia in northwest Spain. His mother’s ancestors were Irish and Swedish. He was born in the Excelsior District of San Francisco, California, on August 1, 1942, to Jose Ramon “Joe” Garcia and Ruth Marie “Bobbie” (née Clifford) Garcia, who was herself born in San Francisco. His parents named him after composer Jerome Kern. Jerome John was their second child, preceded by Clifford Ramon “Tiff”, who was born in 1937. Shortly before Clifford’s birth, their father and a partner leased a building in downtown San Francisco and turned it into a bar, partly in response to Jose being blackballed from a musicians’ union for moonlighting.
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Paddy Moloney (Irish: Pádraig Ó Maoldomhnaigh; 1 August 1938 – 12 October 2021) was an Irish musician, composer, and record producer. He co-founded and led the Irish musical group the Chieftains, playing on all of their 44 albums. He was particularly associated with the revival of the uilleann pipes.
Moloney was born in the Donnycarney area of Dublin on 1 August 1938, the son of housewife Catherine (née Conroy) and Irish Glass Bottle Company accountant John Moloney. His mother bought him a tin whistle when he was six and he started to learn the uilleann pipes at the age of eight.
see full post...Irish Multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, record producer, scholar and folklorist Mick Moloney died on July 27, 2022, in New York City.
Mick Moloney devoted most of his life to the preservation and dissemination of Irish folk music in the United States. He produced numerous Celtic music albums and served as the artistic director for various performing arts tours, including the influential Green Fields of America, an ensemble of Irish and Irish-American musicians, singers, and dancers that toured (and still tours) the United States and abroad.
Michael Moloney (15 November 1944 – 27 July 2022) was an Irish musician and scholar.
Moloney served as the artistic director for several major arts tours, including the Green Fields of America, an ensemble of Irish musicians, singers, and dancers which toured across the U.S. on several occasions. He produced and performed on over 70 albums and acted as advisor for scores of festivals and concerts all over America.
In 1992, Moloney received a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. For his work in public folklore, he received a 1999 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Moloney was the author of Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish American History Through Song released by Crown Publications in February 2002 with an accompanying CD on Shanachie Records. He hosted three nationally syndicated series of folk music on American Public Television; was a consultant, performer, and interviewee on the Irish Television special Bringing It All Back Home; a participant, consultant, and music arranger of the PBS documentary film Out of Ireland; and a performer on the PBS special The Irish in America: Long Journey Home.
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see full post...Explanation: Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of viewspans about 7,000 light-years across M94‘s central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy’s compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation from inspiraling gas. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered bythe gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring.
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Stanley Jordan (born July 31, 1959) Chicago. is an American jazz guitarist noted for his playing technique, which involves tapping his fingers on the fretboard of the guitar with both hands.
see full post...Kenneth Earl Burrell (born July 31, 1931) Detroit, MI is an American jazz guitarist known for his work on numerous top jazz labels: Prestige, Blue Note, Verve, CTI, Muse, and Concord. His collaborations with Jimmy Smithwere notable, and produced the 1965 Billboard Top Twenty hit Verve album Organ Grinder Swing.[1] He has cited jazz guitarists Charlie Christian, Oscar Moore, and Django Reinhardt as influences, along with blues guitarists T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters.
see full post...Henry Jones Jr. (July 31, 1918 – May 16, 2010) Vicksburg, MS was an American jazz pianist, bandleader, arranger, and composer. Critics and musicians described Jones as eloquent, lyrical, and impeccable. In 1989, The National Endowment for the Artshonored him with the NEA Jazz Masters Award. He was also honored in 2003 with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Jazz Living Legend Award. In 2008, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. On April 13, 2009, the University of Hartford presented Jones with an honorary Doctorate of Music for his musical accomplishments.
see full post...The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth. The piece of the nebula shown here is the dark, dense globule IC 1396A; it is commonly called the Elephant’s Trunk nebula because of its appearance at visible light wavelengths, where there is a dark patch with a bright, sinuous rim. The bright rim is the surface of the dense cloud that is being illuminated and ionized by a very bright, massive star (HD 206267) that is just to the east of IC 1396A. (In the Spitzer Space Telescope view shown, the massive star is just to the left of the edge of the image.) The entire IC 1396 region is ionized by the massive star, except for dense globules that can protect themselves from the star’s harsh ultraviolet rays.The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is now thought to be a site of star formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 yr) stars that were discovered in infrared images in 2003. Two older (but still young, a couple of million years, by the standards of stars, which live for billions of years) stars are present in a small, circular cavity in the head of the globule. Winds from these young stars may have emptied the cavity.
The combined action of the light from the massive star ionizing and compressing the rim of the cloud, and the wind from the young stars shifting gas from the center outward lead to very high compression in the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. This pressure has triggered the current generation of protostars.
David William Sanborn (born July 30, 1945) is an American alto saxophonist. Though Sanborn has worked in many genres, his solo recordings typically blend jazz with instrumental pop and R&B. He released his first solo album Taking Off in 1975, but has been playing the saxophone since before he was in high school.
One of the most commercially successful American saxophonists to earn prominence since the 1980s, Sanborn is described by critic Scott Yanno was “the most influential saxophonist on pop, R&B, and crossover players of the past 20 years.” He is often identified with radio-friendly smooth jazz, but he has expressed a disinclination for the genre and his association with it.
Sanborn was born in Tampa, Florida, and grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri. He suffered from polio for eight years in his youth. He began playing saxophone on a physician’s advice to strengthen his weakened chest muscles and improve his breathing, instead of studying piano. Alto saxophonist Hank Crawford, at the time a member of Ray Charles‘s band, was an early and lasting influence on Sanborn.
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