Saturday, February 13, 2016

Ken Allan Dronsfield writes and illustrates



Infirmity

Can you feel my throbbing heart
crying out through the hazy sky?
Asking not for pleasure nor pain;
just inhaling my life once again.
Floating in the Aura of timeless love,
a feathery wisp from high above.
Catching the rays and Nebula's blaze;
weaving a web of a pretentious maze.
I'll walk a path where piety leads.
Following as yet another shall leave,
my essence bruised and forever bleeds.
For my life's intention is blessed love;
But my reality becomes a chaotic infirmity.




1 comment:

  1. A nebula (Latin for "cloud") has been a subject of astronomical observation and theory for millennia, but the word has only recently been defined in a consistent, scientific manner. In 150 Claudius Ptolemaeus noted the presence of five stars that appeared nebulous, as well as a region of luminosity between the constellations Ursa Major and Leo that was not associated with any observable star. (He called his book "Hē mathēmatikē syntaxis" [The Mathematical Collection]because he believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies could be explained in mathematical terms, but it is universally referenced as the Almagest (from a hybrid of the Arabic and Greek for "the greatest"). But the first observation of an actual nebula was not made until 964, when Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi noted "a little cloud" which is now known as the Andromeda galaxy; until telescopes were invented, the confusion between galaxies and other "nebulae" such as comets, star clusters, and Messier objects was routine. In 1912, American astronomer Vesto Slipher observed how a nebula surrounding a star matched the spectra of the Pleiades open cluster. By 1922, when Edwin Hubble announced that nearly all nebulae are associated with stars and that their illumination comes from star light, it had become the consensus that many of the "nebulae" were in fact distant spiral galaxies. In contemporary terms, nebulae are massive clouds of dust, hydrogen, helium, and plasma. About 99% of the interstellar medium (ISM) is gas; about 75% of its mass is hydrogen and about 25% helium, and it consists of neutral atoms, molecules, and charged particles (plasma) such as ions and electrons. Most nebulae measure hundreds of light years in diameter but have only about 1 atom per cubic cm
    of density -- a nebular cloud the size of Earth would only have a few kg of mass. Though the gas is dispersed, its total matter is considerable in the vast distance between stars. Given sufficient gravitational attraction between nebulae, it coalesces into regions of increasing density while parts of the ISM undergo gravitational collapse to form stars and planets. However, planetary nebulae comprise low-mass stars entering the final stage of their lives (red giants), slowly losing their outer layers due to helium flashes in their interior. When the star has lost enough material, its temperature increases and the ultraviolet radiation it emits ionizes the surrounding material it has thrown off. Star lose mass, emitting a circumstellar shell of hydrogen gas, and then begins to emit strong infrared radiation until the central star reaches 30,000 degrees K, after which it is hot enough to ionize the surrounding gas. In short, nebulae are both the starting and end points of stellar evolution.

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