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Imagination

A book needs us desperately. We have to pull it off the shelf. We have to open it up. We have to turn the pages, one by one. We even have to use our imagination to make it work. So, suddenly, that book is not just a book; it’s our book. –  Mo Willems

The pictures are not very defined because one wants to be able to have the imagination playing over them. – Quentin Blake

Because they have so little, children must rely on imagination rather than experience. – Eleanor Roosevelt

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space…”— Shakespeare (Hamlet)

Image: Two merging galaxies, from NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes. (Credit: NASA, ESA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/D. Elmegreen (Vassar)

These shape-shifting galaxies have taken on the form of a giant mask. The icy blue eyes are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, and the mask is their spiral arms. The false-colored image consists of infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red) and visible data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (blue/green). 

NGC 2207 and IC 2163 met and began a sort of gravitational tango about 40 million years ago. The two galaxies are tugging at each other, stimulating new stars to form. Eventually, this cosmic ball will come to an end, when the galaxies meld into one. The dancing duo is located 140 million light-years away in the Canis Major constellation.

The infrared data from Spitzer highlight the galaxies' dusty regions, while the visible data from Hubble indicates starlight. In the Hubble-only image (not pictured here), the dusty regions appear as dark lanes.

The Hubble data correspond to light with wavelengths of .44 and .55 microns (blue and green, respectively). The Spitzer data represent light of 8 microns.

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Children's Books, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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