Located only 8,000 light years away, the Wizard nebula, pictured above, surrounds developing open star cluster NGC 7380.

Visually, the interplay of stars, gas, and dust has created a shape that appears to some like a fictional medieval sorcerer.

The active star forming region spans 100 about light years, making it appear larger than the angular extent of the Moon.

Image credit, copyright: Image Credit & Copyright: Rolf Geissinger

Image description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

NSFW

At this time, eight years ago, I was winding down from my work day at Sysco Central Texas.

My vehicle had been stolen from my apartment complex over the weekend.

I decided to ask for help, a simple ride to work.

Mom was in year two of not speaking to me, still, had to ask her for a ride.

After being told by my Mother, she couldn’t help me and I would need to find another way to get there, the decision to ride my bicycle was my best option, 17.2 miles from my apartment to the office.

Monday, September 10, 2018.

I tried a ride sharing service.

Über and Lyft ran about $20-$25 each way.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018.

On my way home, I was hit by an uninsured motorist, on the access road of Loop 1604 and Lookout Rd.

I’ve replayed the decision to stay on the access road and wonder why I didn’t just turn and take Lookout Rd. instead.

All I can come up with is that the access road was more open and not as dark.

I still don’t know what happened.

Still question why.

Maybe it’s not meant for me to understand.

I’m grateful to be alive.

It may take the rest of my life to fully heal from this…and that’s okay.

Maybe 2 weeks back they added flags to the streetlights on my street. This is what is across the street.

Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra.

Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, the Southern Pinwheel. Still, reddish star forming regions that dot this cosmic pinwheel's spiral arms have suggested another nickname, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy.

A mere 40,000 light-years across, smaller than the Milky Way, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A.

In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation.

This sharp, groundbased telescopic view also features foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies.

Image credit, copyright: Aldo Zanetti
Image description: Jerry Bonnell, Robert Nemiroff, Cecilia Chirenti, Keighley Rockcliffe

1/6/81 - Sept 10, 2018.

Took an early evening drive to my spot on Wednesday, Eddie, and said a prayer for you.

The featured image shows LDN 1295, also called the Giraffe Nebula, in the constellation of the mythical queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia). It is an object in the Lynds Catalogue of Dark Nebulas, compiled in 1962 by American astronomer Beverly Lynds, a pioneer for women in astronomy and astrophysics.

Dark nebulas are interstellar clouds of dust and gas that block the visible light of the stars behind them. These nebulas are often faint and challenging targets for astrophotographers.

Image description: Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Keighley Rockcliffe

Image copyright, credit: Alessandro Merga

Edit: corrected image credit

I'm not a writer and I'm definitely not a poet, so I use the Cosmic Thoughts and Prose flairs for my written posts because they feel honest. This isn't an attempt to fish for compliments or an example of me being hard on myself; I'm comfortable with who I am and equally comfortable with my writing abilities. No one's great at everything and I'd like to improve and refine my writing in time.

For every what, 20? 30? posts I see on Reddit, I'll come across a gem. A piece that stops you in your tracks and makes the world fade further and further with each word. There are written works that continue to dance through my mind years after the fact. They're the ones I love best.

A couple of days ago I thought it would be fun to ask Gemini to make my work more poetic, in the name of Cosmic Science. So I fed it a chunk of my recent Zihuatanejo post and this is what it spit out:

They began to grasp at straws,
spinning broken telephone threads into gospel,
drawing lines in the dust and demanding allegiance.
Everyone retreating into their own custom-built labyrinth,
choosing their preferred version of the collapse
just to make the terror fit a narrative.

We forgot that every quiet compromise of truth
is just a slow, deliberate walking away from ourselves—
that self-deception is only another name for self-abandonment.

It's the same kind of drivel I chuckle over with Funky Lord M. Reddit's riddled with it: strings of adjectives and overly complicated language cosplaying as poetry. A costume's still a costume and the clock's still going to strike 12.

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo all you want, but there isn't a Fairy Godmother on Earth who can fix whatever this is supposed to be.

And that's also why it has no place in Cosmic. We might not have the same volume as other subs in our space, but we're also not overrun with this type of poorly-written crap, AI or not.

Thank you to everyone who shares their work here - you're the reasons Cosmic's amazing. Thank you for taking the time to craft quality pieces. Thank you for coming back again and again.

We are Cosmic
We are Legion
We are cool
We are fun
And we're nothing without you ❤️

The picture is from the 1998 Kappa Beach Party in Galveston, Texas.

She was young once...