Common Themes

These beautiful cigarette cards are part of a set entitled “Romance of the Heavens”, issued in 1928 by Wills Cigarettes. (Top and bottom photos were issued in 1929 and have been redone to say “Romance of the Heavens” in the top corner, instead of “Wills Cigarettes”.) I’ve been unable to find larger scans of them (those shown were taken from auction scans, the parts that weren’t watermarked, anyway.)

One seller describes them: “These cards show drawings of the planets and stars; the backs describe how these were understood in the 1920s.” Fortunately an eBay Guide has the details:

Name Of Set: Romance of the Heavens
Manufacturer: WD and HO Wills
Issue Year: 1928
Card Number: 50
Card Titles: Haley’s Comet, One Theory of the Formation of the Moon, Neap Tides, Spring Tides, A Shower of Meteors, A Lunar Corona, Typical Lunar Craters, Lunar Craters, The Earth as Seen From the Moon, Earth Shine, Mock Moons, Phases of the Moon, Portion of the Moon’s Surface, The Dumb Bell Nebula, A Spiral Nebula, The Inner Planets, The Outher Planets, Jupiter, Two Views of Mars, An Imaginary Landscape of Mars, The Surface of Mercury-Imaginary, Saturn, Saturn’s Rings, Two Views of Saturn, The Dark Sid of Venus-and Imaginary View, The Sunlit Sid of Venus-and imaginary view, Cassiopeia and Pole Star, The Composition of a Star, The Evolution of a Star, Two Giant Stars, Leo, The Milky Way, Orion, The Pleiades, The Pole Star and the Plough, The Southern Cross, Variable Stars, The Aurora Australis, The Aurora Borealis, The Cause of Auroras, Solar Corona, Electrical Discharges from the Sun, An Eclipse, An Eclipse of the Sun Viewed from the Moon, The Midnight Sun, Shadows and Rainbows, Solar Prominences, Typical Sun Spot, and The Zodiacal Light.

Today is Black Friday and the frantic pistol-start of the Christmas shopping season. HubbleSite released their holiday cards earlier this week — this is the third year they’ve offered them — and you can download beautifully-designed files, ready for the print shop… or your printer! Each year I swear I’m going to have some of these printed up, and when the time comes I can never afford it. Shown above and below are this year’s new designs; 21 others to choose from!

This fantastic view of the Milky Way is a composite of images taken by Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn. The colors are spectacular. (And I think I use that descriptor every week on every Perspective post… hmm. Do I? Use “spectacular” too much?)

Explanation: Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month over Ontario, Canada, when part of a spectacular sky also became visible in a reflection off a lake. To start, the brightest objects visible are bright stars and the planet Jupiter, seen as the brightest spot on the upper left. A distant town appears as a diffuse glow over the horizon. More faint still, the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy becomes apparent as a dramatic diffuse band across the sky that seems to crash into the horizon far in the distance. In the foreground, a picturesque landscape includes trees, a lake, and a stone wall. Finally, on this serene night in July when the lake water was unusually calm, reflections appear. Visible in the lake are not only reflections of several bright stars, but part of the Milky Way band itself. Careful inspection of the image will reveal, however, that bright stars leave small trails in the lake reflections that do not appear in the sky above. The reason for this is because the above image is actually a digital composite of time-consecutive exposures from the same camera. In the first set of exposures, sky images were co-added with slight rotations to keep the stars in one place.

This image, released August 27th, is a composite view from the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory of galaxy clusters in collision. Not only is this false-color image spectacular to look at, it displays evidence of dark matter, as HubbleSite explains:

A powerful collision of galaxy clusters has been captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. This clash of clusters provides striking evidence for dark matter and insight into its properties.

The observations of the cluster known as MACS J0025.4-1222 indicate that a titanic collision has separated the dark from ordinary matter and provide an independent confirmation of a similar effect detected previously in a target dubbed the Bullet Cluster. These new results show that the Bullet Cluster is not an anomalous case.

MACS J0025 formed after an enormously energetic collision between two large clusters. Using visible-light images from Hubble, the team was able to infer the distribution of the total mass — dark and ordinary matter. Hubble was used to map the dark matter (colored in blue) using a technique known as gravitational lensing. The Chandra data enabled the astronomers to accurately map the position of the ordinary matter, mostly in the form of hot gas, which glows brightly in X-rays (pink).

As the two clusters that formed MACS J0025 (each almost a whopping quadrillion times the mass of the Sun) merged at speeds of millions of miles per hour, the hot gas in the two clusters collided and slowed down, but the dark matter passed right through the smashup. The separation between the material shown in pink and blue therefore provides observational evidence for dark matter and supports the view that dark-matter particles interact with each other only very weakly or not at all, apart from the pull of gravity.

NASA Images is a great new(er) resource developed last year as a joint project between NASA and Archive.org. If you’ve been looking for a one-stop resource for everything NASA does, you just found it!

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.