Heroes of Tolkien by David Day

Is a comprehensive guide that explores the epic characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth universe. The book covers the heroic journey of the major protagonists, including Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and more.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section provides detailed information about each hero, their strengths, and weaknesses, and their role in the story. The second part of the book offers insights into the world of Middle-earth and its mythology.

"Heroes of Tolkien" offers a detailed analysis of the literary, historical, and mythological influences that shaped the creation of each hero in Tolkien's works. David Day offers fascinating insights into how these heroes represent timeless themes such as courage, self-sacrifice, and loyalty.

Overall, "Heroes of Tolkien" is an essential guide for Tolkien fans who want to deepen their understanding of the beloved characters that populate Middle-earth. The book provides a wealth of information, insights, and analyzes that will engage and enlighten readers of all ages.

Webb High Resolution Images

 We finally have all the pictures and they are amazing. I am speechless... The amount of detail is impressive.

All these images are at full resolution so you can enjoy them

Deep Field SMACS 0723

Carina Nebula

 Southern Ring Nebula

Stephan's Quintet

New pic of SMACS 0723

 This new image has left me speechless

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScIetail.

 Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail.

 Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Thoughts:

Our natural satellite revolves around the Earth describing an elliptical orbit (as if we take a circle, flatten it a bit and give it the shape of a melon). Therefore, while the Moon revolves around our planet, there is a certain point in the lunar orbit that is farthest from Earth, called apogee, and another one that is closer, called perigee. The Moon takes approximately one month to complete a full revolution and in that period it will position itself one day at apogee and, a few days later, at perigee. On the other hand, we have the succession of the lunar phases. From Earth, as the Moon revolves around us, we will see how the Sun illuminates different areas of the lunar hemisphere visible from our planet every day. In full phase we see the Moon fully illuminated, 100% full of light reflected from the Sun because the three stars are aligned in this order: Sun, Earth and Moon. When it is full phase, like today, the Moon rises above the horizon when the Sun sets and is visible in the sky throughout the night.

The perigee moon occurs when the full moon phase coincides with the lunar perigee, or at least no more than 10% apart from this point. In such a situation, our satellite can be seen 14% larger and 30% brighter than any other full moon that does not coincide with perigee. But beware! Be very careful: we would need those two full moons in the sky at the same time to compare them and, most likely, we would not notice a difference.

The lunar perigee occurs on June 15, at 01:21 hop (official peninsular time, the one marked by our clocks) with the Moon at 357,434 km. from the earth. The full moon phase is today at 13:52 hop. Therefore, this coming night from Tuesday the 14th to Wednesday the 15th you can take a look to see if you can discern that the full moon looks bigger than any other full moon…

The perigee moon is a usual astronomical phenomenon that has occurred in the past, occurs today and will occur again in the future… next month, on the night of July 13-14, it will happen again. Do not let yourself be influenced by all the commotion that can be organized in the media with this astronomical event. By the way, supermoon is an astrological term (with ele) coined by an astrologer named Richard Nolle to dye as catastrophic the fact of the Moon-Earth closer proximity. It is a term that astronomers do not like at all because it is an unscientific astrological term and, therefore, lacking in any rigor. Do not use it and, please, do not let its use spread.

In the image you have the perigee moon that occurred on February 19, 2019, captured by our colleague César González using a mobile phone attached to the telescope located in the observation tower of the Planetarium.

Credit and image: César González Arranz (Madrid Planetarium).

The Hobbit Companion by David Day

In the hobbit, Companion master hobbit investigator David Day explores the brilliant web of verbal hocus-pocus that J. R. R. Tolkien delightedly spun in the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

He reveals the myriad of crafty puns, riddles, hidden meanings, and mythical associations beneath the saga´s thrilling surface.

Intriguing to the uninitiated, and enchanting to the Tolkien enthusiast, The Hobbit companion can only enhance our enjoyment of Tolkien´s mysterious world.

The year 1997

Illustration by Linda Postman

Editorial 1010 Printing International LTD

War and the Future, de H.G. Wells

Is a classic World War I story that focuses on Italy, France, and Britain in the Great War.

This book is a piece of war propaganda by H.G. Wells which was published in North America under the title Italy, France and Great Britain at War (the subtitle of the British original).

With the exception of the opening piece, its chapters were published as articles in the press.

Although he proclaimed at the beginning of the volume that "I declare myself an extreme pacifist", Wells strongly supported Britain's war against Germany "in the hope that thus we and the world can get rid of the German will to power and all". its humiliating and disgusting consequences from now on forever.

War and the future is divided into four parts. In the first part, titled "The Death of the Effigy", Wells argues that "the great man in this war is the common man", sketching a portrait of General Joffre as "a single figure who represents the best quality of warfare." ally", due to his "leadership without vulgar ambitions... It is as if it were the ordinary common sense of men, incarnate." In an account of a visit to the King of Italy, "the first king I ever knew", Wells is impressed by the monarch's lack of pomp and regality.

The second part, entitled "The War in Italy" (August 1916), describes the city of Udine and the mountain warfare, as well as a visit to Verona, Venice, and Milan.

The third part, "The Western War" (September 1916), describes visits to the Western Front near Arras and Soissons in France. Wells expresses his confidence that aerial dominance methods, combined with photography, have allowed the Allies to develop tactics that will surely defeat Germany.

Wells praises the British soldiers but criticizes the officer corps for its rigidity of mind. He emphasizes that new technologies have transformed the art of warfare in ways that military professionals are too slow to comprehend. In particular, fighting in disciplined formations and cavalry are no longer of military importance, while "artillery is now the most essential instrument of war." Wells describes a tour of a munitions factory given by André Citroën. He devotes a chapter to tanks as "the beginning of a new phase of warfare" and notes that in 1903 he had described a tank in a short story ("The Land Ironclads").

The final part of War and the Future is entitled "How People Think About War" and addresses a variety of topics:

- The inability of contemporaries to understand the nature and causes of war;

-The psychology of what he calls "the profitable pacifist" (willing to accept any kind of peace), origins that he finds in "the resentful employee", and the "conscientious objector"

-The effect of war on religious thought;

-French and Italian doubts about the British;

-The effect of the war on future labour relations;

-The prospects of ending the war. On the latter issue, Wells saw a chance for victory in 1917, but conceded that "the universally detested war may continue until 1918 or 1919."

Wells said that "the United States should finally take responsibility for a world peace agreement.

In general, it is a slow book, but with an interesting vision of the war from the ideological point of view of the English Empire.

First image of Sagittarius A* Black Hole

This is the black hole at the centre of the galaxy. It's been pictured for the first time. The object, known as Sagittarius A* is four times larger than our Sun. You can see the central dark area where the hole is located, which is circled by light from super-heated gases that have been accelerated by enormous gravitational forces. The Event Horizon Telescope was collecting data to create a remarkable image of the Milky Way’s supermassive Black Hole. A legion of telescopes, including three NASA X-ray observatories in Space, were also use.

These observations are being used by astronomers to understand how the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (or simply Sgr A*), interacts with and benefits from its environment, which is 26,000 light-years away from Earth.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which observed Sgr. A* in April 2017, made the new image. Scientists in the collaboration also looked at the black hole using facilities that detect different wavelengths. They assembled X-ray data collected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Arrays (NuSTAR) and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, radio data from East Asian Very Long-Baseline Interferometers (VLBI), and Global 3-millimeter VLBI arrays; infrared data taken from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile Goddard coordinates the Swift mission with Penn State, Los Alamos National Laboratory (New Mexico) and Northrop Grumman Space Systems (Dulles, Virginia). The University of Leicester, Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Britain, Brera Observatory, Italy, and the Italian Space Agency are other partners. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Southern California, manages NuSTAR for NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission partners and contributors include NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center), the Italian Space Agency, (ASI), Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

One of the main goals was to capture X-ray flares. These flares are believed to be driven magnetically similar to the Sun's but can be tens to millions of times more powerful. The EHT observes flares approximately every day in the sky, which is slightly larger than the event area of Sgr. A*, the point at which there is no return for the matter that falls inward. A second goal was to get a better understanding of what's happening on a larger scale. The EHT result shows striking similarities to M87*, which was the last black hole it imaged. However, the larger picture is more complex.

"If the EHT image shows us the eye of a black hole hurricane then these multiwavelength measurements reveal winds and rain equivalent to hundreds, or even thousands, of miles beyond," Daryl Haggard, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, one of the leading scientists in the multiwavelength campaign. "How does the cosmic storm interact with, and even disrupt, its galactic environment?"

One of the most important questions about black holes is how they gather, ingest, expel, or ingest material at near-light speed. This is called "accretion" and is essential to the formation of stars, planets, and black holes of any size throughout the universe.

Chandra images of hot gases around Sgr A*, which are vital for accretion studies, tell us how much material is captured by nearby stars by the black holes' gravity and how much makes it to the event horizon. These critical details are not available using current telescopes for M87* or any other black holes in the universe.

"Astronomers agree on the basic facts -- black holes have material swirling about them and some of that falls across the event-horizon forever," Sera Markoff, a coordinator of multiwavelength observations at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "With all the data we have gathered for Sgr. A*, we can get a lot more than this basic picture."

The large international collaboration of scientists compared data from NASA's high energy missions and other telescopes to state of the art computational models. These models take into account factors like Einstein's general theory and effects of the magnetic field, as well as predictions about how much radiation material around the black holes should produce at different wavelengths.

Comparing the models to the measurements suggests that the magnetic field surrounding the black hole is strong. The angle between the line of sight to the black holes and its spin axis is also low, less than 30 degrees. This means that we see Sgr A* from our vantage point more than we do from side-on. It is remarkably similar to EHT’s first target M87*.

The EHT observations also revealed that the researchers were able to capture X-ray outbursts from Sgr. A*. One was faintly seen with Chandra, Swift, and another moderately bright with Chandra. Chandra regularly observes X-ray flares similar in brightness to those seen with Chandra. However, this is the first time the EHT simultaneously observed Sgr. A*. This gives the EHT an exceptional opportunity to identify the responsible mechanism by using actual images.

The ring is approximately the same size as Mercury's orbit around the star. This is approximately 60 million kilometres or 40 million miles.

This monster is far away, at 26,000 light-years, so it's unlikely that we will ever encounter any danger.

What is a "black hole"?

-A black hole is an area of space in which matter has collapsed on itself

-The gravitational pull on everything is so strong that even light cannot escape.

-The explosive demises of large stars will lead to the formation of black holes

-Some are even more massive than others and weigh billions of times as much as our Sun.

-It is not known how these monsters, which are found in galaxy centres, were created.

-It's evident that they are energizing the galaxy and will impact its evolution

-Grey presentation line

This is a technical tour.

EHT uses a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to trick the system. This essentially combines eight radio antennas in a wide spacing to create a telescope that is the same size as our planet. This arrangement allows the EHT to measure the angle of the sky in microarcseconds. EHT team members speak of a sharpness in vision that is similar to seeing a bagel on top of the Moon.

Even so, supercomputing is required to create an image from several petabytes (PB = one million gigabytes).

A black hole's lens or bends can indicate that there is no light. However, the brilliance and power of matter bursting around the darkness and expanding out into an accretion disk is a clue to where it is.