Tag Archives: stars



 home and in self-imposed quarantine

soon to venture back out 

to the stars, the blue sky, the river, and the woods. 



‘the vast differences that separate the stars are providential.

beings and worlds are quarantined from each other.

the quarantine is lifted only

for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgement

to have safely traveled from star to star.’

-carl sagan





image credit: google images




“my folks came to the u.s. as immigrants, aliens, and became citizens.

i was born in boston, a citizen, went to hollywood and became an alien.”

-leonard nimoy

in honor of the annual academy awards/oscars in hollywood

and to

all of the amazing people who come to our country as aliens

only to become shining stars in our sky.

bright stars.



Astronomy Nuns
Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri mapped the positions and brightness of 481,215 stars. 

These Little-Known Nuns Helped Map the Stars.

A century later, the identities of women who mapped over 481,000 stars are finally known.

The history of astronomy is riddled with underappreciated women who looked to the stars long before their scientific contributions were recognized. But the constellation of early women astronomers is glowing brighter, writes Carol Glatz for Catholic News Service, with the recognition of four once nameless nuns who helped map and catalog half a million stars in the early 20th century.

Glatz reports that the nuns, Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri, were recruited by the Vatican to measure and map stars from plate-glass photographs. They cataloged the brightness and locations of a whopping 481,215 stars during their years of diligent work. Photos of the nuns had appeared in books about the history of astronomy, but the identity of the women was not known—and their accomplishments not recognized—until now.

Their years of labor were finally acknowledged when Father Sabino Maffeo, a Jesuit priest who works at the Vatican Observatory, found their names while organizing papers for the archives. Today, the project to which the nuns contributed is as obscure as the nuns themselves, but at the time it was one of the largest scientific undertakings in history.

In April 1887, 56 scientists from 19 countries met in Paris to embrace a new discipline: astrophotography. Their plan was a bold one—use 22,000 photographic plates to map the entire sky. The work was split up among institutions across Europe and the United States, including the Vatican Observatory. Each institution was given a particular zone of the sky to map and categorize.

At the time, male astronomers often relied on women to serve as their “computers.” The men would direct the project, but behind the scenes, women did the labor-intensive processing, cataloging and calculating for low wages. Famously, Harvard Observatory director Edward Charles Pickering hired “Pickering’s Harem,” a group of bright young women, to do his share of the star cataloging. Also known as “the Harvard Computers,” these women, formidable astronomical minds in their own right, were only recently acknowledged for their contribution to science.

And what a contribution—the project resulted in he Astrographic Catalogue, a 254-volume catalog of 4.6 million stars. The star atlas called the Carte du Ciel was only halfway finished by the time astronomers stopped working on it in 1962. Though the atlas project was destined to fail, the catalog became the basis of a system of star references that is still used today.

Though the women didn’t end up counting all of the stars, perhaps one day history will do a better job of counting the women whose diligent work helped map out the starry skies.

credits: smithsonianmag.com, flikr

in summer, the song sings itself. ~ william carlos williams



climbing the apple trees

flying kites

chasing fireflies


sending messages in a bottle

wandering through the library


playing big games

losing shoes


baking cupcakes

reading books


so many surprises

walking everywhere

finding clues


making costumes

singing made-up songs

talking into the sewer to invite the ninja turtles to a party


meeting the people all around

making up and telling stories

robots and legos


dancing like centipedes

playing in and out and around the water


sand in your pants

 tunnels and giant ants


making a palace for the fairies to move into


big, big messes

cardboard forts


cousins, cats, dogs, goats, bunnies, lobsters, frogs, fish

and more family of all kinds

and becoming part of the art


you are six shooting stars on a shining summer’s day.


john lennon

dedicated with love to all of the little stars who make my life so big

and all of my seasons so bright –