Day: July 20, 2021

Thors Helmet

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Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens.  Popularly called Thor’s Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor’s Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the cosmic head-covering is more like an interstellar bubble, blown with a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble’s center. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Great Overdog. This remarkably sharp image is a mixed cocktail of data from broadband and narrowband filters, capturing not only natural looking stars but details of the nebula’s filamentary structures. The star in the center of Thor’s Helmet is expected to explode in a spectacular supernova sometime within the next few thousand years. via NASA https://ift.tt/36KlQ3x

Wikipedia article of the day for July 20, 2021

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Wikipedia article of the day is Apollo 11 50th Anniversary commemorative coins. Check it out: Article-Link Summary: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary commemorative coins were issued by the United States Mint in 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of the first crewed landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. There is a gold half eagle (five-dollar coin), two sizes of silver dollars, and a copper-nickel clad half dollar, all with the same design and curved, with the obverse concave and the reverse convex. The obverse shows a bootprint on the lunar surface, and the reverse (pictured), based on a well-known photo by Armstrong, depicts the visor of Aldrin’s space suit, reflecting Armstrong, the U.S. flag and the Lunar Module Eagle. The depiction of Aldrin made him the seventh individual depicted on a U.S. coin to be alive at the time it was struck. The program was the most successful U.S. commemorative coin issue since the 2014 National Baseball Hall of Fame coins, with more than 600,000 Apollo 11 coins sold. The larger silver dollar won the Coin of the Year Award for 2019-dated issues.