Attic calendar

The Attic calendar or Athenian calendar is the calendar that was in use in ancient Attica, the ancestral territory of the Athenian polis. It is sometimes called the Greek calendar because of Athens's cultural importance, but it is only one of many ancient Greek calendars.
Although relatively abundant, the evidence for the Attic calendar is still patchy and often contested. As it was well known in Athens and of little use outside Attica, no contemporary source set out to describe the system as a whole. Further, even during the well-sourced 5th and 4th centuries BC, the calendar underwent changes, not all perfectly understood. As such, any account given of it must be a tentative reconstruction.
Local focus.
The Attic calendar was an exclusively local phenomenon, used to regulate the internal affairs of the Athenians, with little relevance to the outside world. For example, just across the border in Boeotia, the months had different names, and the year even began in midwinter. In Athens, the year began six months later, just after midsummer. Furthermore, while Greek months were supposed to begin with the first sighting of the new moon, it was determined locally and with a degree of variability. In many years, the months in the two communities would have more or less coincided, but there is no sign that they tried to keep the days of the month exactly aligned, as they would have seen no reason to do so.
The divide between these neighbouring calendars perhaps reflected the traditional hostility between the two communities. Had the Boeotians been speakers of an Ionic dialect, the one spoken in Athens, there would have been overlap in the names of months. An example is the island of Delos, where the calendar shared four out of twelve month-names with Athens, but not in the same places in the year. There, even though the island was under some degree of Athenian control from around 479 to 314 BC, the year started, as with the Boeotians, at midwinter.
More than one calendar.
Athenians lived under a number of simultaneous calendars that were used to fix days for different purposes. How much each calendar meant to individuals probably depended on how they lived. They may be set out as follows:
Festival calendar (lunisolar).
Intercalation.
The year was meant to begin with the first sighting of the new moon after the summer solstice. Ideally, the solstice would occur toward the end of Skirophorion, the final month of the year.
The new year would then begin on the day after the first sliver of the new moon was seen (or presumed to be seen). However, because the relation of these two events, solstice and new moon, is variable, the date of the new year (in relation to a Gregorian date) could move by up to a month.
This linking of solar and lunar years defines the calendar as lunisolar. Because 12 lunar months are approximately 11 days shorter than a solar year, using a purely lunar calendar (such as the Islamic one) removes any relation between the months and the seasons, causing the months to creep backwards over the seasons. By tying the start of their year to the summer solstice Athenians forced the months to relate, with some elasticity, to the seasons.
In order to deal with the 11-day difference between 12 lunar months and 1 solar cycle, when it was judged that the months had slid back enough (roughly every three years), an extra month was inserted ("intercalated"), leading to a leap year with about 384 days in it. The extra month was achieved by repeating an existing month so that the same month name was used twice in a row. The sixth month, Poseideon, is most frequently mentioned as the month that was repeated; however months 1, 2, 7, and 8 (Hekatombaiōn, Metageitniōn, Gameliōn, and Anthesteriōn) are also attested as being doubled.
Various cycles were in existence for working out exactly which years needed to add a thirteenth month. A nineteen-year cycle, the Metonic cycle, was developed in Athens by the astronomers Meton and Euctemon (known to be active in 432 BC), could have been used to pattern the insertion of leap years to keep the lunar and solar years aligned with some accuracy. There is, however, no sign that any such system was in fact used in Athens, whose calendar seems to have been administered on an "ad hoc" basis.<br>
Names of months.
The first function of this calendar was to set the days for the religious festivals. In a county fair role, they encompassed a much broader range of activities than the word "religious" suggests and were central to the life of the city.
The Athenian months were named after gods and festivals. In this the calendar differed from the Mesopotamian models that lie behind all Greek lunar calendars. In the Sumerian and Babylonian prototypes, for instance, the months were named after the main agricultural activity practised in that month. Many Athenian festivals had links with different stages of the agricultural cycle, such as festivals of planting or harvest. It perhaps added to the need to keep lunar and solar calendars roughly aligned, though this was not always achieved. The farming year, however, was not the primary focus of the calendar.
At Athens month 6, Poseideon, took its name directly from the god Poseidon. More commonly, the god appears in the form of a cult title. (A cult title is the name or aspect under which a god was worshipped at a particular festival.) Examples are Maimakterion, named after Zeus ("the rager") and Metageitnion, after Apollo as helper of colonists.
Of all of the months, only the eighth, Anthesterion, was named directly after the major festival celebrated in its month, the Anthesteria. While the month-naming festivals of Pyanepsia, Thargelia and Skira were relatively important, some of the grandest celebrations in the life of the city are not recognised in the name of the month. Examples are the Great Dionysia held in Elaphebolion (month 9) and the Panathenaia are only indirectly recognised in Hekatombaion (month 1), named after the "hekatombe", the sacrifice of a "hundred oxen" held on the final night of the Panathenaia. More often than not, the festival providing the month name is minor or obsolete. For instance, the second month, Metageitnion, is named after a cult title of the god Apollo, but there is no trace of a festival bearing the name. The same goes for months 5 and 6, Maimakterion and Poseideon.
The calendars of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor (along the western coastline of modern Turkey) often share month names with Athens. For instance, at Miletos four of the same month names were in use, namely Thargelion, Metageitnion, Boedromion and Pyanepsion, and the last of these even occupied the same position as month four in both communities. Traditionally, these Ionian cities were founded by colonists from Attica (perhaps around 1050 BC). It may be then that the Athenian month names refer to a festival schedule some hundreds of years out of date.
List of months.
No complete list survives anywhere with all twelve months set out in order, but the following reconstruction is certain. The correlation suggested here between the Athenian months and those of the modern (Gregorian) calendar is loose, and, in some years, it might have been off by over a month.
Days of the month.
The months were 29 or 30 days in length, loosely in alternation, since the moon orbits the earth in roughly 29.5 days. However, rather than following a set scheme (such as the popular rhyme "Thirty days hath September..."), the duration of each month was declared just before month's end in an attempt to latch the first of the following month onto the upcoming new moon. The short months of 29 days were known as "hollow" and the ones with 30 days as "full".
Each month was divided into three phases of ten days associated with the waxing moon, the full moon and the waning moon. The naming of the days was complex. The first day of the month was simply "noumenia" or new moon, a name used in virtually every Greek calendar. From there the days were numbered up to the 20th day. For the final third of the month the numbering turned around to do a countdown from ten to the last day. Only the middle phase had numbers for the days running higher than 10 and even these were often phrased as "the third over ten" and so forth. In the wings of the month, the numbered days ran 2–10 and then 10–2. Days in these sections were distinguished from each other by adding the participle "waxing" and "waning" to the month name. In the centre of the month with its unambiguous numbering there was no need for this, though later the term "of the middling month" was used. The final day of the month was called "henē kai nea", "the old and the new". Peculiar to Athens, this name presents the day as bridging the two moons or months. Elsewhere in Greece this day was usually called the 30th.
Athenian festivals were divided between the 80 or so annually recurring celebrations and a set of monthly holy days clustered around the beginning of each month. They were often the birthdays of gods, the Greeks thinking of birthdays as a monthly rather than a yearly recurrence. Every month, days 1–4 and 6–8 were all sacred to particular gods or divine entities, amounting to some 60 days a year:
Monthly and annual festivals were not usually allowed to fall on the same days so every festival month had an opening phase with exactly recurrent practices and celebrations while in the body of each month was a unique schedule of festival days.
A parallel function of this calendar was the positioning of the perhaps 15 or so forbidden days on which business should not be transacted.
Rather than considering the month as a simple duration of thirty days, the three-part numbering scheme focuses on the moon itself. In particular the waning days 10–2 and the waxing days 2–10 frame the crucial moment where the moon vanishes and then reappears.
A date under this scheme might be "the third (day) of Thargelion waning", meaning the 28th day of Thargelion.
To summarise the days with special names.
This strange juxtapositioning of the two days called the tenth, the earlier and the later, further highlighted the shift into the moon's waning phase.
When a month was to last 29 instead of 30 days (a "hollow" month), the last day of the month ("the old and new") was pulled back by one day. That is to say, the "second day of the waning month" (the 29th in straight sequence) was renamed as month's end.
State calendar.
As Ionians, the Athenians had always been divided into four tribes. Although the tribes were never abolished, one of the key reforms at the creation of democracy after 506 BC was to distribute citizens under a new system of ten tribes to try to ensure even participation across the whole community. From then on, ten became a kind of hallmark number for the democracy, as so much citizen activity was done through the ten tribes. (For instance, the 10 generals leading the 10 regiments, the 10 sets of public arbitrators, the 10 treasurers of the Delian league and so on.)
This decimal ordering extended to the creation of a supplementary calendar with ten months. Each year, each tribe contributed 50 members to the council of 500 (boule), which played an important role in the administration of the city. For one tenth of the year, each tribal fifty was on duty, with a third of them in the council chamber at all times as an executive committee for the state. Their period of office was known as a 'prytany' or state month.
In the 5th century, the calendar was solar-based by using a year of 365 or 366 days and paying no attention at all to the phases of the moon. One likely arrangement is that the ten prytanies were divided between six months of 37 days followed by four months of 36 days. That would be parallel to the arrangement in the 4th century explained below.
From several synchronized datings that survive, it is evident that the political and the festival years did not have to begin or end on the same days. The political new year is attested 15 days either way from the start of the festival year. The system is known from the 420s; whether it had been in place from the beginning of the ten-month system is not clear.
However, in 407 BC the two calendars were synchronized to start and end on the same days. Hereafter as described in the 4th century "Constitution of the Athenians" the civic year was arranged as follows:
In years with an extra month intercalated into the festival calendar, the political months were probably lengthened to 39 and 38 days, a method that would have maintained the balance between the tribes. Evidence, however, is lacking.
In the Macedonian period (307/306 – 224/223 BC), with twelve tribes (and the prytanies), evidence shows that the month and the prytany were not coterminous and that, in general, the six first prytanies had 30 days and the last six had 29 days and that in an intercalary year, the 384 days are equally subdivided. (Meritt, 1961: Ch.VI)
In the Thirteen Phylai period (224/223 – 201/200 BC), it would be expected that in an intercalary year prytanies and months must have been fairly evenly matched and that in an ordinary year, the conciliar year was made up of three prytanies of 28 days followed by ten prytanies of 27 days, but there is strong evidence that the first prytany had usually 27 days. (Meritt, 1961: Ch.VII)
The political months had no name but were numbered and given in conjunction with the name of the presiding tribe (which, as determined by lot at the expiry of their predecessors' term, gave no clue as to the time of year). The days were numbered with a straightforward sequence, running from 1 to the total number of days for that month.
One of the main roles of the civic calendar was to position the four assembly meetings to be held each prytany. If possible, assembly meetings were not held on festival days, including the monthly festival days clustered at the start of each month. As a result, the meetings were bunched slightly toward the end of the month and made to dodge especially the larger festivals.
A date under this calendar might run "the 33rd day in the 3rd prytany, that of the tribe Erechtheis", the style used in Athenian state documents (surviving only as inscriptions). Sometimes, however, a dating in terms of the festival calendar is added as well.
Manipulation.
The Attic calendar was determined on the ground, month by month and year by year, in the light of immediate concerns, political or military. It was in the control of magistrates, who were not astronomers. How heavyhanded the interference was is controversial. Some scholars believe that if a festival date fell on a day needed for an assembly meeting, an extra day could be inserted by simply repeating the same day name.
There is clear evidence that it was done later. In Athens in 271 BC, just before the Great Dionysia, four days were inserted between Elaphebolion 9 and 10, putting the calendar on hold. Presumably, it was to gain extra rehearsal time for the festival with its performances of tragedy and comedy. A similar story comes from the 5th century BC but at Argos: the Argives, launching a punitive expedition in the shadow of the holy month of Karneios when fighting was banned, decided to freeze the calendar to add some extra days of war. However, their allies rejected the rearrangement and went home.
Aristophanes' "Clouds", a comedy from 423 BC, contains a speech whose complaint is brought from the moon: the Athenians have been playing round with the months, "running them up and down" so that human activity and the divine order are completely out of kilter: "When you should be holding sacrifices, instead you are torturing and judging." A situation is known to have applied in the 2nd century BC, when the festival calendar was so out of sync with the actual cycles of the moon that the lunisolar date was sometimes given under two headings, one "according to the god", apparently the moon, and the other "according to the archon", the festival calendar itself.
Seasonal calendar.
A third calendar regulating Athenian lives was solar or seasonal. As such, it was fundamental for seasonal activities like farming and sailing. Within the broad divisions of the seasons, it relied on star risings and settings to mark more precise points in time. Star risings are the days when particular stars or constellations that have been below the horizon during hours of darkness first appear after sunset. Different star risings were keyed to various farm tasks, such as when to harvest: Hesiod in the "Works and Days" urges the farmer to harvest when the Pleiades rises (an event which elsewhere is set to mark the end of spring). Such a system was part of general Greek tradition, but fitted to local geography and conditions. Hesiod also uses the rising of Arcturus to mark the ending of winter and marks the start of Spring with the coming of the sparrows.
The seasons were not viewed by Greeks as dividing the year into four even blocks but rather spring and autumn were shorter tail sections of the overarching seasons, summer and winter. The divisions could be formalised by using star risings or settings in relation to the equinoxes: for instance, winter is defined in one medical text as the period between the setting of the Pleiades and the spring.
The older tradition as seen in Hesiod's "Works and Days" was extended by astronomical research to the creation of star calendars known as "parapegmas". They were stone or wooden tablets listing a sequence of astronomical events, each with a peg hole beside it. Lines of bare peg holes were used to count the "empty days" between what were taken as the significant celestial events. Often set up in town squares (agoras), the tablets put the progression of the year on public display.
This system would have been fundamental to an individual's sense of the advancing year, but it barely intersected with the festival or state calendars. They were more civic in character and required managing to maintain their coherence with the year of the seasons. The seasonal and sidereal calendar, on the other hand, was immune to interference so Thucydides could date by the rising of Arcturus without having to wade into the confusion of disconnected city-state calendars.
Dating events.
The modern calendar, as well as regulating the immediate year, is part of a system of chronology that allows events to be dated far into the future and the past so a given date includes day, month and year.
By contrast, the Attic calendar had little interest in ordering the sequence of years. As in other Greek cities, the name of one of the yearly magistrates, at Athens known as the eponymous archon, was used to identify the year in relation to others. The sequence of years was matched to a list of names that could be consulted. Instead of citing a numbered year, one could locate a year in time by saying that some event occurred "when X. was archon". That allowed the years to be ordered back in time for a number of generations into the past, but there was no way of dating forward beyond ordinary human reckoning (as in expressions such as "ten years from now").
There was, for instance, no use of a century divided into decades. A four-year cycle was important, which must have helped structure a sense of the passing years: at Athens, the festival of the Panathenaia was celebrated on a grander scale every fourth year as the Great Panathenaia, but that was not used as the basis of a dating system.
As both narrowly local and cyclical in focus then, the calendar did not provide a means for dating events in a comprehensible way between cities. A dating system using the four-yearly Olympiads was devised by the Greek Sicilian historian Timaeus (born c. 350 BC) as a tool for the historical research, but it was probably never important on a local level.


Daryl Haggard

Daryl Haggard is an American astronomer and Assistant Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at McGill University and the McGill Space Institute.
Early life and education.
Haggard was born in Seattle, Washington, the fifth of eight children, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico at 6 months of age. Haggard's father was a mathematician and college professor. Her mother trained as biologist and owns a native plant nursery in Santa Fe.
She studied at St. John's College, receiving a Bachelors of Arts in philosophy and mathematics in May 1995. She became fascinated by orbital mechanics after reading Newton's Principia and realizing that mathematical equations could describe the orbits of planets.
In 2004, Haggard received a Master of Science in Physics from San Francisco State University, where she studied X-ray-emitting binary stars in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. She received a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 2010. Her thesis work focused on active galactic nuclei (accreting supermassive black holes at the center of distant galaxies).
Career.
After completing her Ph.D., Haggard accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University. She spent one year as an Assistant Professor of Astronomy in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Amherst College, before accepting an Assistant Professor position at McGill University and joining the newly formed McGill Space Institute in 2015.
Daryl Haggard's research group uses radio, submillimeter, near infrared, and X-ray telescopes to study compact objects, including active galactic nuclei, Sagittarius A* (the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy) and the mergers of neutron stars.
In 2017, she led a team that used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to detect the afterglow of the merger of two neutron stars, GW170817, the first detection of X-rays from a gravitational wave source. Follow-up observations of the merger remnant by Haggard's group in 2017 showed the remnant grew brighter, rather than dimming, as expected. The remnant finally began to fade in X-ray observations taken in 2018, 260 days after the merger.
She is currently a member of the Canadian Joint Committee on Space Astronomy, the Event Horizon Telescope Multiwavelength Coordination Team and the Thirty Meter Telescope International Science Development Team. Haggard had also served on the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Governance Task Force, was the editor of the AASWOMEN Newsletter and was elected a member of the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) Executive Committee.
Awards and recognition.
CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar (2017–19)
Kavli Frontiers Fellow (2014–16)
CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow (2010–14)
Personal life.
Haggard resides in Montreal with her husband Nicolas Benjamin Cowan, an astronomer and planetary scientist. They have one son.


Kaleideum

Kaleideum in Winston-Salem, North Carolina was created from the July 2016 merger of Children's Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County. Currently, the museum operates two locations — Kaleideum Downtown (formerly The Children's Museum of Winston-Salem) and Kaleideum North (formerly SciWorks).
History.
Kaleideum North.
Kaleideum North began in 1964 as the Nature Science Center, started by the local Junior League; the museum was originally housed in a barn at Reynolda Village. In 1972, the Nature Science Center moved to its present location on Hanes Mill Road, into a campus that originally housed the Forsyth County Home and Hospital, the precursor to Forsyth Medical Center. In 1992 the Nature Science Center closed and underwent a major renovation, re-opening under the name SciWorks. In 2001, the museum upgraded the facilities by doubling the space of one of the main galleries and adding an indoor eating area to the building.
Kaleideum North, located at 400 West Hanes Mill Road in Winston-Salem, consists of a building with of exhibit space, a environmental park, and a planetarium. The exhibit galleries cover a wide range of topics such as North Carolina geography and geology, the human body, physics (featuring a Foucault pendulum), sound, and technology. In addition, there is a traveling exhibit gallery that features both nationally touring exhibits and exhibits created in-house. The BioWorks exhibit, focusing on animals both local and exotic, was renovated in 2010.
The environmental park features white-tailed deer and a barnyard that has donkeys, sheep, and cows. The museum runs several interactive education programs for elementary and middle school students. In addition, Kaleideum North also offers special summer camps, as well as camp-ins for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
Kaleideum Downtown.
Kaleideum Downtown, formerly The Children's Museum of Winston-Salem, is located at 390 South Liberty Street in Winston-Salem. The museum was created by the Junior League of Winston-Salem as a gift to the city to celebrate the league's 75th anniversary. The museum opened its doors during November 2004 as a safe place for young children and their families to learn and play together. Designed with a literature-based theme, the museum focused on experiential learning and the educational benefits of play through literature, storytelling, and the arts, while offering birthday parties, summer camps, field trips, workshops, storytime programming, theatre performances, and special community events. The Junior League pledged that 10 percent of its active members would volunteer at the museum until at least 2020.
In November 2014 the Children's Museum acquired Peppercorn Theatre, which was founded in 2010 by John Bowhers and Anna Rooney. Peppercorn became a programming arm of the museum and produces high quality, original theatre works and puppet shows to entertain and educate.
Merger between Children's Museum and SciWorks.
A merger between the Children's Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks was first discussed in 2015. In July 2016 they officially merged, and Forsyth County commissioners approved $17 million for a new museum building where the sheriff's office used to be. On February 7, 2017, the name Kaleideum, combining kaleidoscope and museum, was announced for the museum.
Kaleideum announced on July 6, 2017, that Stitch Design Shop and Gensler would be the architectural firms designing its new building.
Permanent exhibits.
Kaleideum Downtown features many permanent and rotating exhibits. The permanent exhibits include: "Kaleidoscape", a crocheted climbing structure by fiber artist Toshiko MacAdam; two multi-level climbing structures by playground designer Tom Luckey; "The Enchanted Forest", an imaginative play area with a folklore theme; "The Amazing Library", a library for young readers; "Food Lion Supermarket", a child-sized supermarket area with plush food; "Amazing Airways", a series of air tubes that are designed to allow children to test hypotheses about air flow; " The Prop Shop", a recreated theater backstage that provides craft materials and suggested art activities; and "Krispy Kreme Doughnut Factory", a recreated doughnut assembly line and delivery truck.
Kaleideum North features a planetarium; PhysicsWorks, an exploration of physics through simple machines and demonstrations; BioWorks, the museum's collection of small live animals including a Blue-and-yellow macaw; HealthWorks, the museum's human biology exhibit; KevaWorks, a KEVA Planks build area; Mountains to Sea, a natural history exhibit complete with animal, plant, and geological specimens; nature trails; and barnyard and garden learning areas.


John Inge (cricketer)

John Walter Inge (31 March 1839 – 9 January 1919) was an English first-class cricketer and British Army officer.
The son of Charles Inge, he was born in March 1839 at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire. He was educated firstly at Rossall School until 1853, before attending Charterhouse School from 1853–56. After completing his education, Inge was commissioned into the British Army as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in June 1860. Inge made a single appearance in first-class cricket for the Gentlemen of Kent against the Gentlemen of Marylebone Cricket Club at Canterbury in August 1863. Batting twice in the match, he was run out for 4 runs in the Gentlemen of Kent first innings, while in their second innings he was dismissed for 9 runs by George Milman.
Inge was promoted to captain in November 1872, with him later serving in the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80, during which he was decorated. He was promoted to major in February 1881, before gaining the rank of lieutenant colonel in September 1887. Having completed five years as a regimental lieutenant colonel, he was retired from active service in September 1892. Inge died at Hollywell Lodge in Oxford in January 1919. His brothers Francis and William both played first-class cricket, as did his great-nephew Will Inge.


Pulsed accretion

Pulsed Accretion in astronomy is the periodic modulation in accretion rate of young stellar objects in binary systems, producing a periodic pulse in the observed infrared light curves of T Tauri stars.
In double stars in young stellar objects, a protoplanetary disk is formed around each star, accreted from matter close to the star. In such a binary star system a strongly eccentric orbit produces strong gravitational forces on the circumstellar disks at periastron, and such disturbance can lead to a temporary increase in the accretion rate onto the star. This increased accretion rate leads to a change of intensity in the infrared, such intensity rising by up to tenfold in the protostar LRLL 54361. Brightness changes in the light curve that have the same period as the orbital period of the binary system, are always assumed to be due to pulsed accretion.


Mentore Maggini

Mentore Maggini (February 6, 1890 – May 8, 1941) was an Italian astronomer.
He was director of the Collurania Observatory and is best known for his maps of Mars and the work on binary stars.
A crater on Mars was named in his honor.


Pallasite main group

Almost all pallasite meteorites are part of the pallasite main group.


Messina astronomical clock

The astronomical clock of Messina is an astronomical clock constructed by the Ungerer Company of Strasbourg in 1933. It is built into the campanile of Messina Cathedral.
The mechanism was designed by Frédéric Klinghammer, with the artistic design based on plans by Théodore Ungerer. Parts of the design are similar to the Strasbourg astronomical clock. It was commissioned by the Archbishop of Messina (Angelo Paino) to mark the reconstruction of the campanile after the 1908 Messina earthquake, on the advice of Pope Pius XI, who gave him a functioning model of the Strasbourg clock.
The clock's displays appear in several different levels of the campanile, on the sides facing the square and the cathedral.
Components.
The side of the campanile facing the square has the following displays, described from bottom to top:
Astronomical dials.
The side of the campanile facing the cathedral has two dials, plus the moon phase:
Above the dials, the moon is represented by a half-gold, half-black rotating sphere, 1.2m in diameter, which indicates the lunar phase.


John Diebel

John C. Diebel (born 1943) is the founder of telescope manufacturer Meade Instruments and a recipient of the Franklin Institute's Bower Award For Business Leadership.
Meade Instruments.
Soon after receiving a doctorate in electronic engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Diebel landed an engineering job at Hughes Aircraft. It was there that he realized that he wanted to start his own business, and after doing some research in a public library, he concluded that he would start a small mail-order business selling products for amateur astronomy.
In 1972, after procuring a loan of $2500, Diebel made his first purchase from a telescope supplier in Japan and placed an ad in "Sky & Telescope" magazine. Eventually, Diebel was able to quit his job at Hughes and work on his mail-order business from his one-bedroom apartment full-time. He named his company Mead, but eventually added the "e" at the suggestion of a co-worker at Hughes. Meade Instruments would eventually become the world's largest telescope manufacturer for amateur astronomy, with distribution in over thirty countries.
Diebel received the Franklin Institute's Bower Award for Business Leadership in 1998 and retired from Meade Instruments in 2003. The asteroid 15276 Diebel was named in honor of Diebel.


Conny Aerts

Conny Clara Aerts, born 26 January 1966, is a Belgian (Flemish) professor in astrophysics. She specialises in asteroseismology. She is associated with KU Leuven, where she is the director of the Institute of Astronomy, and Radboud University, where she leads the Chair in the Astroseismology group. In 2012, she became the first woman to be awarded the Francqui Prize in the category of Science & Technology.
Biography.
Aerts was born in Brasschaat, Belgium. She received her Bachelor and Master in Mathematics from the University of Antwerp. She participated in the International Astronomical Youth Camp in 1987 and 1988. She then went on to complete her PhD in 1993 at KU Leuven. After completing she spent several months doing research at the University of Delaware. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the Fund for Scientific Research from 1993 to 2001, when she was appointed lecturer at KU Leuven. She became first associate professor in 2004, and then full professor in 2007 at KU Leuven.
Research.
In her research, she uses the star oscillations to determine the internal rotation profile of stars. The oscillations are obtained from both ground and space-based telescopes. In her PROSPERITY project, she used data obtained from the CoRoT satellite and the NASA Kepler satellite. She is currently the Belgian principal investigator on the PLATO mission,
Aerts developed methodology using Gaussian mixture classification to analyse the data. She uses this to determine the star structure and inform stellar models within stellar evolution theory. With these techniques she has made a number of discoveries, including that of non-non-rigid rotation in giant stars.
The theoretical models she develops based on the star oscillations also allow her determine the age of stars with a high accuracy.
Aerts has twice been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC): in 2008 for PROSPERITY, and again in 2015 for a project entitled MAMSIE (Mixing and Angular Momentum Transport of Massive Stars).
Outreach.
Aerts is Vice-Dean of Communication & Outreach at the Faculty of Science at KU Leuven. She is outspoken about the need to increase gender equality in the sciences, and is a member of the International Astronomical Union Women in Astronomy Working Group.


Diacria quadrangle

The Diacria quadrangle is one of a series of 30 quadrangle maps of Mars used by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Research Program. The quadrangle is located in the northwestern portion of Mars’ western hemisphere and covers 180° to 240° east longitude (120° to 180° west longitude) and 30° to 65° north latitude. The quadrangle uses a Lambert conformal conic projection at a nominal scale of 1:5,000,000 (1:5M). The Diacria quadrangle is also referred to as MC-2 (Mars Chart-2). The Diacria quadrangle covers parts of Arcadia Planitia and Amazonis Planitia.
The southern and northern borders of the Diacria quadrangle are approximately and wide, respectively. The north to south distance is about (slightly less than the length of Greenland). The quadrangle covers an approximate area of 4.9 million square km, or a little over 3% of Mars’ surface area. The "Phoenix" lander’s landing site (68.22° N, 234.25° E) lies about 186 km north of the northeastern quarter of the Diacria quadrangle. The landscape viewed by the "Phoenix" lander is probably representative of a large portion of the terrain in the northern Diacria quadrangle.
Origin of name.
Diacria is the name of a telescopic albedo feature located at 48° N and 190° E on Mars. The feature was named by Greek astronomer E. M. Antoniadi in 1930 after Diacria, the highlands around Marathon in north-west Attica, Greece. The name was approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1958.
Physiography and geology.
The Diacria quadrangle is located at the northwestern edge of the Tharsis volcanic plateau. Topographic, volcanic, and tectonic features associated with the large volcanoes Olympus Mons (south of map area) and Alba Mons (east of map area) characterize the southeastern and east central portions of the quadrangle.
The northern and western areas of the quadrangle lie in the northern lowland plains of Mars and cover portions of Amazonis Planitia (in the south), Arcadia Planitia (west central) and Vastitas Borealis (in the north). The large crater Milankovič (118.4 km in diameter) is located in the north central portion of the quadrangle at 54.7° N, 213.3° E.
Elevation data from the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter (MOLA) instrument on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft shows that the regional terrain slopes gently downward to the northwest, with the highest elevation about 3.5 km (3,500 m) above datum (Mars "sea level") on the western flank of the Alba Mons volcano in the southeastern portion of the quadrangle. The lowest points in the quadrangle are about 4.5 km below datum (-4,500 m) in Vastitas Borealis in the northwest corner. The regional relief is thus about 8 km, but at a local scale, slopes are very shallow; the portion of Amazonis Planitia in the south central part of the quadrangle contains some of the flattest terrain on the entire planet.
What does the surface look like.
Unlike some other places visited on Mars with landers ("Viking" and "Pathfinder"), nearly all the rocks near "Phoenix" are small. For about as far as the camera can see, the land is flat, but shaped into polygons between 2–3 meters in diameter and is bounded by troughs that are 20 cm to 50 cm deep. These shapes are due to ice in the soil expanding and contracting due to major temperature changes. The microscope showed that the soil on top of the polygons is composed of flat particles (probably a type of clay) and rounded particles. Also, unlike other places visited on Mars, the site has no ripples or dunes. Ice is present a few inches below the surface in the middle of the polygons, and along its edges, the ice is at least 8 inches deep. Pictures of the surface under the lander appear to show that the landing rockets may have exposed a layer of ice. When the ice is exposed to the Martian atmosphere it slowly sublimates. Some dust devils were observed.
Polygonal patterned ground.
Polygonal, patterned ground is quite common in some regions of Mars. It is commonly believed to be caused by the sublimation of ice from the ground. Sublimation is the direct change of solid ice to a gas. This is similar to what happens to dry ice on the Earth. Places on Mars that display polygonal ground may indicate where future colonists can find water ice. Patterned ground forms in a mantle layer, called latitude dependent mantle, that fell from the sky when the climate was different.
Western flank of Alba Mons.
The western flank of the Alba Mons volcano makes up the eastern and southeastern edge of the quadrangle. In terms of area, Alba Mons (formerly, Alba Patera) is the largest volcanic feature on Mars. The flank has a very low slope (l° or less) and is characterized by lava flows and an outwardly radiating array of ridges and channels. Some of the channels have a drainage pattern that resembles that formed by rain water on the slopes of terrestrial volcanoes. However, many other channels on the flanks of Alba Mons were clearly formed by flowing lava.
The western flank of the volcano also contains some NW-SE trending grabens (Cyane Fossae). An image from High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) beautifully shows a line of rimless pit craters in Cyane Fossae. The pits may have formed by the collapse of surface materials into open fractures created as magma intruded the subsurface rock to form dikes.
Acheron Fossae.
Near the southeast corner of the quadrangle (37° N, 225° E) lies a southward sloping, semicircular block of ancient, heavily cratered, highland crust that is dissected by numerous, arcuate troughs (Acheron Fossae). The troughs are grabens, structures formed when the crust moves downward between two faults. Grabens form in areas where the crust has undergone extensional stress. The Acheron Fossae region is partially covered by volcanic deposits from Alba Mons in the east, geologically young basaltic lava flows or sediments in the west and southeast, and the jumbled, furrowed terrain of Lycus Sulci in the south.
Lycus Sulci (Olympus Mons Aureole).
Lycus Sulci (24.6° N, 219° E) is the name applied to the northwestern portion of a larger terrain feature that partially encircles Olympus Mons and extends up to 750 km from the giant shield volcano’s base. This feature, called the Olympus Mons aureole, consists of several large lobes and has a distinctive corrugated or grooved surface texture. East of Olympus Mons, the aureole is partially covered by lava flows, but where it is exposed it goes by different names (Gigas Sulci, for example). The origin of the aureole remains debated, but it was likely formed by huge landslides or gravity-driven thrust sheets that sloughed off the edges of the Olympus Mons shield.
Erebus Montes.
Westward from Lycus Sulci, across the flat plains of Amazonis Planitia, lies an elongated region of knobby terrain called Erebus Montes (Erebus Mountains). The region contains hundreds of clustered to isolated hillocks that stand 500 to 1,000 m above the surrounding plains. The presence of numerous partly filled "ghost" craters in the area indicates that the hills represent the high-standing remnants of ancient highland crust that was inundated by lava flows and (possibly) alluvial sediments from Tharsis in the southeast and the Elysium volcanic province to the west.
Arcadia Planitia and Southern Vastitas Borealis.
North and east of the Erebus Montes are low-lying plains that characterize a large part of the Diacria Quadrangle and of the Martian northern hemisphere in general.
Medium resolution Mariner 9 and Viking spacecraft images from the 1970s show that large portions of Arcadia Planitia have an overall mottled (blotchy light and dark) appearance. At higher resolution, landforms commonly consist of lobate flow fronts; small channel segments; wrinkle ridges; pedestal craters; and low, isolated volcano-like hills with summit craters. MOLA images reveal numerous large, shallowly buried craters, suggesting that an old cratered surface lies under a layer of younger material.
At the resolution of the Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft (around several m per pixel), much of the northern plains has a distinctly stippled, pitted texture that causes the ground to resemble the surface of a basketball or orange rind. This texture is likely caused by a mantle of ice and dust covering the landscape. The small hollows and pits formed as the ice evaporated (sublimed).
The geologic history and origin of the northern plains are complex and still poorly understood. Many of the landforms resemble periglacial features seen on Earth, such as moraines, ice-wedged polygons, and pingos. Arcadia Planitia and Vastitas Borealis likely consist of a hodgepodge of old lava flows, ice-related features, and reworked sediments of diverse origin. Some theorize that the northern plains were once covered by oceans or large lakes.
Expanded Craters.
Large impacts often create swarms of small secondary craters from the debris that is blasted out as a consequence of the impact. Studies of a type of secondary craters, called expanded craters, have given us insights into places where abundant ice may be present in the ground. Expanded craters have lost their rims, this may be because any rim that was once present has collapsed into the crater during expansion or, lost its ice, if composed of ice.
Excess ice (ice in addition to what is in the pores of the ground) is widespread throughout the Martian mid-latitudes, especially in Arcadia Planitia. In this region, are many expanded secondary craters that probably form from impacts that destabilize a subsurface layer of excess ice, which subsequently sublimates. With sublimation the ice changes directly from a solid to gaseous form. In the impact, the excess ice is broken up, resulting in an increase in surface area. Ice will sublimate much more if there is more surface area. After the ice disappears into the atmosphere, dry soil material will collapse and cause the crater diameter to become larger. Places on Mars that display expanded craters may indicate where future colonists can find water ice.
Latitude dependent mantle.
Much of the surface of Mars is covered by a thick smooth mantle that is thought to be a mixture of ice and dust. This ice-rich mantle, a few yards thick, smoothes the land. Because there are few craters on this mantle, the mantle is relatively young.
Changes in Mars's orbit and tilt cause significant changes in the distribution of water ice from polar regions down to latitudes equivalent to Texas. During certain climate periods water vapor leaves polar ice and enters the atmosphere. The water returns to the ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed with dust. The atmosphere of Mars contains a great deal of fine dust particles. Water vapor condenses on the particles, then they fall down to the ground due to the additional weight of the water coating. When ice at the top of the mantling layer goes back into the atmosphere, it leaves behind dust, which insulates the remaining ice.
Ice exposed in new craters.
A study reported in the journal Science in September 2009, shows that some newly formed craters have excavated clean, water ice from just below the surface in five locations on Mars. After a short time, the ice disappears, subliming into the atmosphere. The ice is only a few meters deep. The ice was confirmed with the Compact Imaging Spectrometer (CRISM) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The ice was found in a total of 5 locations. One of the locations (Site 5) is in the Diacria quadrangle at about 46° N, 182° E (Arcadia Planitia).
This discovery is significant because it shows the presence of subsurface ice at latitudes further south than expected and proves that future colonists on Mars will be able to obtain water from a wide variety of locations. The ice can be dug up, melted, and then taken apart to provide fresh oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel. Hydrogen is the powerful fuel used by the space shuttle main engines
Dark slope streaks.
Many places on Mars show dark streaks on steep slopes, such as crater walls. It seems that the youngest streaks are dark and they become lighter with age. Often they begin as a small narrow spot then widen and extend downhill for hundreds of meters. Several ideas have been advanced to explain the streaks. Some involve water, or even the growth of organisms. The streaks appear in areas covered with dust. Much of the Martian surface is covered with dust because at more or less regular intervals dust settles out of the atmosphere covering everything. We know a lot about this dust because the solar panels of Mars rovers get covered with dust. The power of the Rovers has been saved many times by the wind, in the form of dust devils that have cleared the panels and boosted the power. So we know that dust falls from the atmosphere frequently.
It is most generally accepted that the streaks represent avalanches of dust. Streaks appear in areas covered with dust. When a thin layer of dust is removed, the underlying surface appears dark. Much of the Martian surface is covered with dust. Dust storms are frequent, especially when the spring season begins in the southern hemisphere. At that time, Mars is 40% closer to the sun. The orbit of Mars is much more elliptical then the Earth's. That is the difference between the farthest point from the sun and the closest point to the sun is very great for Mars, but only slight for the Earth. Also, every few years, the entire planet is engulfed in a global dust storm. When NASA's Mariner 9 craft arrived there, nothing could be seen through the dust storm. Other global dust storms have also been observed, since that time.
Research, published in January 2012 in Icarus, found that dark streaks were initiated by airblasts from meteorites traveling at supersonic speeds. The team of scientists was led by Kaylan Burleigh, an undergraduate at the University of Arizona. After counting some 65,000 dark streaks around the impact site of a group of 5 new craters, patterns emerged. The number of streaks was greatest closer to the impact site. So, the impact somehow probably caused the streaks. Also, the distribution of the streaks formed a pattern with two wings extending from the impact site. The curved wings resembled scimitars, curved knives. This pattern suggests that an interaction of airblasts from the group of meteorites shook dust loose enough to start dust avalanches that formed the many dark streaks. At first it was thought that the shaking of the ground from the impact caused the dust avalanches, but if that was the case the dark streaks would have been arranged symmetrically around the impacts, rather than being concentrated into curved shapes.
Dark streaks can be seen in some of the images below.
Dust and dust devil tracks.
Large portions of the martian surface are blanketed with bright reddish-ochre dust. The dust particles are typically less than 40 micrometres in size and are composed of iron oxide minerals. Data from the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has allowed planetary scientists to estimate the amount of dust cover for broad swaths of the planet. In general, the Diacria quadrangle is extremely dusty, particularly in Arcadia Planitia and the region around the flank of Alba Mons and the Olympus Mons aureole in the southeastern portion of the quadrangle. A few large patches of relatively low dust cover occur in Amazonis Planitia and in the northwest corner of the quadrangle.
Many areas on Mars, including the Diacria quadrangle, experience the passage of giant dust devils. When a dust devil goes by it blows away the coating of dust and exposes the underlying dark surface. Dust devils have been seen from the ground and high overhead from orbit. They have even blown the dust off of the solar panels of the two Rovers on Mars, thereby greatly extending their lives. The twin Rovers were designed to last for 3 months, instead they both lasted more than six years, and one is still going. The pattern of the tracks have been shown to change every few months.
Depressions in Milankovič crater.
The triangular depressions visible in Milankovič crater contain water ice in the straight wall that faces the pole, according to a new study. Eight sites were found with Milankovič crater being the only one in the northern hemisphere. This discovery is important because the ice lies under only a meter or two of cover. Research was conducted with instruments on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The following images are ones referred to in this study of subsurface ice sheets.
Gullies.
Martian gullies are small, incised networks of narrow channels and their associated downslope sediment deposits, found on the planet of Mars. They are named for their resemblance to terrestrial gullies. First discovered on images from Mars Global Surveyor, they occur on steep slopes, especially on the walls of craters. Usually, each gully has a dendritic "alcove" at its head, a fan-shaped "apron" at its base, and a single thread of incised "channel" linking the two, giving the whole gully an hourglass shape. They are believed to be relatively young because they have few, if any craters. A subclass of gullies is also found cut into the faces of sand dunes which themselves considered to be quite young.
On the basis of their form, aspects, positions, and location amongst and apparent interaction with features thought to be rich in water ice, many researchers believed that the processes carving the gullies involve liquid water. However, this remains a topic of active research. The pictures below show examples of gullies in Diacria quadrangle.
Channels.
There is enormous evidence that water once flowed in river valleys on Mars. Images of curved channels have been seen in images from Mars spacecraft dating back to the early seventies with the Mariner 9 orbiter. Indeed, a study published in June 2017, calculated that the volume of water needed to carve all the channels on Mars was even larger than the proposed ocean that the planet may have had. Water was probably recycled many times from the ocean to rainfall around Mars.
Inverted relief.
Inverted relief, inverted topography, or topographic inversion refers to landscape features that have reversed their elevation relative to other features. It most often occurs when low areas of a landscape become filled with lava or sediment that hardens into material that is more resistant to erosion than the material that surrounds it. "Differential erosion" then removes the less resistant surrounding material, leaving behind the younger resistant material, which may then appear as a ridge where previously there was a valley. Terms such as "inverted valley" or "inverted channel" are used to describe such features. Inverted relief has been observed on the surfaces of other planets as well as on Earth. For example, well-documented inverted topographies have been discovered on Mars.
Brain terrain.
Brain terrain is common in many places on Mars. It is formed when ice sublimates along cracks. The ridges of brain terrain may contain a core of ice. Shadow measurements from HiRISE indicate the ridges are 4–5 meters high.


Pierre Puiseux

Pierre Henri Puiseux (; July 20, 1855 – September 28, 1928) was a French astronomer.
Born in Paris, son of Victor Puiseux, he was educated at the École Normale Supérieure before starting work as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory in 1885.
He worked on the aberration of light, asteroids, lunar dynamics and, in collaboration with Maurice Loewy, the ill-fated "Carte du Ciel" project. Puiseux created a photographic atlas of the Moon based on 6000 photographs taken by him and Loewy. In 1892 he was awarded the Valz Prize, and in 1896 was he awarded the Lalande Prize, both from the French Academy of Sciences, which he would later become a member of in 1912.
In 1900, Puiseux received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France (the French astronomical society). He became the Society's president from 1911-1913.
The crater Puiseux on the Moon is named after him.
He was a believing and practicing Catholic who died with the sacraments of the Church.


List of supernova remnants

This is a list of observed supernova remnants (SNRs) in the Milky Way, as well as galaxies nearby enough to resolve individual nebulae, such as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy.
Supernova remnants typically only survive for a few tens of thousands of years, making all known SNRs fairly young compared to many other astronomical objects.


Colonization of Mercury


Battle of Wauhatchie

The Battle of Wauhatchie was fought October 28–29, 1863, in Hamilton and Marion counties, Tennessee, and Dade County, Georgia, in the American Civil War. A Union force had seized Brown's Ferry on the Tennessee River, opening a supply line to the Union army in Chattanooga. Confederate forces attempted to dislodge the Union force defending the ferry and again close this supply line but were defeated. Wauhatchie was one of the few night battles of the Civil War.
Background.
After their disastrous defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga, Union forces under Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee besieged the city, threatening to starve the Union forces into surrender. Bragg's troops occupied Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, both of which had excellent views of the city, the river, and the Union's supply lines. Confederate troops launched raids on all supply wagons heading toward Chattanooga, which made it necessary for the Union to find another way to feed their men. Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant relieved Rosecrans of his command and replaced him with Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas. Grant's first priority upon reaching Chattanooga was to resupply the Union army.
Brown's Ferry operation.
Grant and Thomas initiated the "Cracker Line Operation" on October 26, 1863. It was designed to open the road to Chattanooga from Brown's Ferry on the Tennessee River with a simultaneous advance up Lookout Valley, securing the Kelley's Ferry Road. Brig. Gen. William F. "Baldy" Smith, Chief Engineer of the Military Division of the Mississippi, who conceived the overall Cracker Line plan, was assigned the task of establishing the Brown's Ferry bridgehead. He was assigned two infantry brigades from the 3rd Division, XIV Corps, to accomplish this: the 1st Brigade under Brig. Gen. John B. Turchin and the 2nd under Brig. Gen. William B. Hazen.
At 3:00 a.m. on October 27, portions of Hazen's brigade embarked upon pontoons and floated around Moccasin Bend to Brown's Ferry. Turchin's brigade took a position on Moccasin Bend across from Brown's Ferry. Upon landing, Hazen secured the bridgehead and then positioned a pontoon bridge across the river, allowing Turchin to cross and take position on his right.
Col. William C. Oates of the 15th Alabama guarded the valley with his regiment plus elements of other units. Due to a command mixup, Oates did not know where three reserve regiments were positioned. After the Union surprise landing, Oates attempted a counterattack with his scratch force, but it failed after he was seriously wounded. By the time Brig. Gen. Evander M. Law turned up with the reserve regiments, it was too late; the Federals were too numerous and well entrenched.
Hooker's advance.
Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker marched with three Union divisions from Bridgeport by following the railroad via Shellmound and the Running Water Creek gorge. On October 28, after a rapid march, Hooker's column entered Lookout Valley to the astonishment of Generals Braxton Bragg and James Longstreet, who were having a conference on Lookout Mountain. Longstreet, obsessed with the possibility of a Union attack further to the southwest, had failed to properly scout Hooker's advance.
Hooker, while his force passed through Lookout Valley on October 28, detached Brig. Gen. John W. Geary's division at Wauhatchie Station, a stop on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, to protect the line of communications to the southwest as well as the road west to Kelley's Ferry. Once he reached his goal, "Hooker's dispositions were deplorable," with Howard's understrength XI Corps "bivouacked haphazardly" at Brown's Ferry. Worse, Geary's division, only 1,500-strong after detaching railroad guards, was posted in isolation.
Battle.
Bragg ordered Longstreet to drive away the new Union force. Noting that a wagon train had stopped near Wauhatchie, Longstreet determined to crush Geary's force. He ordered Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins's division to mount a night attack on the Union forces. While Law took his own and Brig. Gen. Jerome B. Robertson's brigades to block Hooker from reinforcing Geary, Jenkins's own 1,800-man South Carolina brigade, led by Col. John Bratton, would assault Wauhatchie Station. Law had Brig. Gen. Henry Benning's brigade remain in support for both Law's and Bratton's efforts. Although the attack was scheduled for 10:00 p.m. on the night of October 28, confusion delayed it until midnight. Though Geary and his officers expected an attack and had thrown out pickets, its suddenness took them by surprise. Enveloped from the north by Bratton, the Union defenders formed into a V-shaped battle line, facing north and east. Geary's son, an artillery lieutenant, was killed in the battle, dying in his father's arms.
Hearing the sounds of battle, the XI Corps quickly fell into ranks near Brown's Ferry. Hooker bypassed Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard in the chain of command and ordered Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz to march to Wauhatchie Station as reinforcements. In the confusion, Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr got his division on the road first. Col. Orland Smith's brigade of Steinwehr's division was fired on by Law's Confederates, who were positioned on a high hill that dominated the road from Brown's Ferry. Smith veered to the east and began climbing the hill. Meanwhile, Hooker mistakenly deployed units from both XI Corps divisions against Law and Benning, leaving no one to go to Geary's aid. Though Law's 2,000 men were greatly outnumbered by Hooker's force, the hilltop position was naturally strong. In the darkness, the only unit in direct contact with Law was Smith's 700-man brigade. Several vigorous assaults by Smith were repulsed. Then, after Law received some erroneous reports, he decided to pull back. Just as his men left their entrenchments, Smith's men spilled over them, capturing some stragglers and scattering a regiment that had failed to get the order to retreat. Meanwhile, Hooker agreed to let Howard proceed to Wauhatchie with some cavalry.
Geary's men continued to hold fast, though they began to run low on ammunition. Just as Bratton began to sense victory, he received a note to retreat since Union reinforcements were arriving at his rear. Bratton withdrew to Lookout Mountain, successfully covered by Benning's brigade. In the Wauhatchie fight, Bratton lost 356 men, while Geary's casualties numbered 216.
Aftermath.
A rumor circulated through the Union camps that Union mules stampeded by the fight had made the Confederates believe they were being attacked by cavalry, causing the Southern retreat; the Union soldiers joked that the mules be "breveted as horses". In truth, the Hampton Legion was disordered by the mules for only a short time. However, this lull allowed the 137th New York to plug a gap in the Federal line.
Union losses in the battle were 78 killed, 327 wounded, and 15 missing. The Confederates reported their losses as 34 killed, 305 wounded, and 69 missing. One account says Bratton lost 408 men while Law lost only 52. Geary reported burying 153 Confederates and capturing over one hundred prisoners, so the Confederate losses may have been over 900 men. The Union army now had its window to the outside and could receive supplies, weapons, ammunition, and reinforcements via the Cracker Line. The way was clear for the start of the Battles for Chattanooga on November 23.


Blick Mead

Blick Mead is a chalkland spring in Wiltshire, England, which has a constant temperature of around and never freezes. It is close to an Iron Age hill fort known as Vespasian's Camp and about a mile from the Stonehenge ancient monument. Archaeology at the site conducted since 2005 shows human habitation going back to 10,000 BP (8,000 BCE) and to be continuous until 6,000 BP (4,000 BCE).
35,000 worked flints and 2400 animal bones, some cooked, mostly from Aurochsen, have been found at the site. There is also the remains of a pit dwelling. These have been used to radiocarbon date the time of settlement. It is thought that the site would have been an attractive place to camp or dwell with a spring that never freezes over.
A rare algae called "Hildenbrandia" lives in the spring and it causes stones taken from it to turn bright red on exposure to air in a matter of hours. In Mesolithic times this could have given the place a magical significance. Its closeness to Stonehenge has led to theories that it is the original attraction that brought hunters to the area, with the colour-changing stones giving the place a spiritual significance in their culture.


Richard Edwin Hills

Richard Edwin Hills (born 30 September 1945) is emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.
Education.
Born on 30 September 1945 and educated at Bedford School, Hill studied the Natural Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge and then went to the University of California, Berkeley to complete his Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Career and research.
Hills was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn between 1972 and 1974, before he returned to the University of Cambridge and became involved in the development of telescopes and instrumentation for astronomy at wavelengths of around one millimetre—the spectral region that lies between radio waves and infrared—which is relatively unexplored.
Hills worked as a scientist at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, where he observed distant, redshifted quasars and studied processes associated with star formation. In December 2007 he was appointed as project scientist for the ALMA telescope, a sub-millimeter interferometer in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile.
Hills is a Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge and was Director of Studies for Natural Sciences at St Edmund's between 1990 and 2007. He was Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge between 1990 and 2007, Deputy Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge between 1999 and 2003, and has been emeritus professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge since 2012.
Awards and honours.
Hills was the awarded the Royal Astronomical Society's Jackson-Gwilt Medal in 1989, and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His nomination for the Royal Society reads:


Face on Moon South Pole

The Face on Moon South Pole is a region on the Moon (81.9° south latitude and 39.27° east longitude) that was detected automatically in an image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter by a computer system using face recognition technologies, as a result of a project that was part of the International Space App Challenge 2013 Tokyo. It is composed of craters and shadows on the Moon's surface that, together, form an image resembling a face.
The "Face on Mars" is a better known example of pareidolia.
Face detection and recognition.
Human brains have the ability to perceive faces on the Moon due to the brain's structure. On the left hemisphere of the human brain, the fusiform gyrus (an area linked to recognition) detects the accuracy of how "facelike" an object is. The right fusiform gyrus then uses information from the left fusiform gyrus to conclude whether or not the image is a face. The gyrus's inherent ability to detect faces and patterns in organisms and nature has also led to a phenomenon called pareidolia, in which the brain detects and recognises faces and patterns in collections of objects where there should be none.
Pareidolia partially explains why humans are biased towards perceiving faces on inanimate objects such as the Moon.
Humans identify faces where there are none due to a Gestalt Principle called the Law of Prägnanz. The Law of Prägnanz states that "people will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form(s) possible." This means that because the craters and hills of the Moon resemble the shape of eyes and a mouth, the human brain condenses those images into a human face because of familiarity, which is another Gestalt Principle.
Craters on the Moon.
The craters of the Moon that make up the "face" on the south pole have been preserved for billions of years. The Moon's exterior is 16% composed of these craters. These craters have been formed by the impacts of meteors; they can be up to 1,600 miles across. Due to the absence of an atmosphere, the Moon is not protected from impacts such as these. Craters are often covered with a mixture of fine dust and rocky debris called regolith. Some research conducted through Clementine suggests that there is also water and ice in some craters throughout the Moon. The craters themselves show a past of being filled with molten lava.
Perception of imagery on the Moon.
Within Western culture, people have said to have seen "the man in the Moon". Within East Asian culture, people have seen a rabbit or hands. In addition, various people have seen different imagery such as a tree, a woman, or a toad.
When people describe the images they see on the Moon, such as a face, they are not directly seeing that image displayed upon the Moon. They are rather looking at an irregular section of the Moon's surface. The irregular section consists of deep holes, called craters, and hills.
Other extraterrestrial formations.
The face on the Moon is not the sole formation which appears to form an image on another astronomical object; another example is the "Face on Mars", discovered during the "Viking 1" mission in 1976. While the face on the Moon is more inverted, the face on Mars is a three-dimensional mound resembling a human face. The "face" is located in a region called Cydonia.
There are also multiple other formations on Mars. There is a specific cluster of mountainous terrain that looks like a smiley face and a skull-like tableland. There is also a volcano that sports a lava flow indentation that strongly resembles Kermit the Frog from the Muppets.
Some see the Cookie Monster in parts of Mercury, and images resembling an eye in the Helix Nebula. On Mercury, there is a clear collection of craters that some say forms an image of Mickey Mouse.


Mare Boreum quadrangle

The Mare Boreum quadrangle is one of a series of 30 quadrangle maps of Mars used by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Research Program. The Mare Boreum quadrangle is also referred to as MC-1 (Mars Chart-1). Its name derives from an older name for a feature that is now called Planum Boreum, a large plain surrounding the polar cap.
The quadrangle covers all of the Martian surface north of latitude 65°. It includes the north polar ice cap, which has a swirl pattern and is roughly across. Mariner 9 in 1972 discovered a belt of sand dunes that ring the polar ice deposits, which is across in some places and may be the largest dune field in the Solar System. The ice cap is surrounded by the vast plains of Planum Boreum and Vastitas Borealis. Close to the pole, there is a large valley, Chasma Boreale, that may have been formed from water melting from the ice cap. An alternative view is that it was made by winds coming off the cold pole. Another prominent feature is a smooth rise, formerly called Olympia Planitia. In the summer, a dark collar around the residual cap becomes visible; it is mostly caused by dunes. The quadrangle includes some very large craters that stand out in the north because the area is smooth with little change in topography. These large craters are Lomonosov and Korolev. Although smaller, the crater Stokes is also prominent.
The "Phoenix" lander landed on Vastitas Borealis within the Mare Boreum quadrangle at 68.218830° N and 234.250778° E on May 25, 2008.
The probe collected and analyzed soil samples in an effort to detect water and determine how hospitable the planet might once have been for life to grow. It remained active there until winter conditions became too harsh around five months later.
After the mission ended the journal "Science" reported that chloride, bicarbonate, magnesium, sodium potassium, calcium, and possibly sulfate were detected in the samples analyzed by "Phoenix". The pH was narrowed down to 7.7±0.5. Perchlorate (ClO4), a strong oxidizer at elevated temperatures, was detected. This was a significant discovery because the chemical has the potential of being used for rocket fuel and as a source of oxygen for future colonists. Also, under certain conditions perchlorate can inhibit life; however some microorganisms obtain energy from the substance (by anaerobic reduction). The chemical when mixed with water can greatly lower freezing points, in a manner similar to how salt is applied to roads to melt ice. So, perchlorate may be allowing small amounts of liquid water to form on Mars today. Gullies, which are common in certain areas of Mars, may have formed from perchlorate melting ice and causing water to erode soil on steep slopes.
Much direct evidence was found for water at this location.
Freezing of atmosphere.
Research based on slight changes in the orbits of spacecraft around Mars over 16 years found that when one hemisphere experiences winter, approximately 3 trillion to 4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide freezes out of the atmosphere onto the northern and southern polar caps. This represents 12 to 16 percent of the mass of the entire Martian atmosphere. These observation support predictions from the Mars Global Reference Atmospheric Model—2010.
Proof for ocean.
Strong evidence for a one time ancient ocean was found in Mare Boreum near the north pole (as well as the south pole). In March 2015, a team of scientists published results showing that this region was highly enriched with deuterium, heavy hydrogen, by seven times as much as the Earth. This means that Mars has lost a volume of water 6.5 times what is stored in today's polar caps. The water for a time would have formed an ocean in the low-lying Mare Boreum. The amount of water could have covered the planet about 140 meters, but was probably in an ocean that in places would be almost 1 mile deep.
This international team used ESO's Very Large Telescope, along with instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, to map out different forms of water in Mars's atmosphere over a six-year period.
Ice cap.
From observations with the Shallow Radar instrument (SHARAD) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers determined that the total volume of water ice in the northern ice cap is 821000 cubic kilometers. That is equal to 30% of the Earth's Greenland ice sheet, or enough to cover the surface of Mars to a depth of 5.6 meters
Dunes.
Sand dunes have been found in many places on Mars. The presence of dunes shows that the planet has an atmosphere with wind, for dunes require wind to pile up the sand. Most dunes on Mars are black because of the weathering of the volcanic rock basalt. Black sand can be found on Earth on Hawaii and on some tropical South Pacific islands.
Sand is common on Mars due to the old age of the surface that has allowed rocks to erode into sand. Dunes on Mars have been observed to move many meters.
In this process, sand moves up the windward side and then falls down the leeward side of the dune, thus caused the dune to go toward the leeward side (or slip face).
When images are enlarged, some dunes on Mars display ripples on their surfaces. These are caused by sand grains rolling and bouncing up the windward surface of a dune. The bouncing grains tend to land on the windward side of each ripple. The grains do not bounce very high so it does not take much to stop them.


Mass deficit

A mass deficit is the amount of mass (in stars) that has been removed from the center of a galaxy, presumably by the action of a binary supermassive black hole.
The density of stars increases toward the center in most galaxies. In small galaxies, this increase continues into the very center. In large galaxies, there is usually a "core", a region near the center where the density is constant or slowly rising. The size of the core – the "core radius" – can be a few hundred parsecs in large elliptical galaxies.
The greatest observed stellar cores reach 3.2 to 5.7 kiloparsecs in radius.
It is believed that cores are produced by binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Binary SMBHs form during the merger of two galaxies. If a star passes near the massive binary, it will be ejected, by a process called the gravitational slingshot. This ejection continues until most of the stars near the center of the galaxy have been removed. The result is a low-density core. Such cores are ubiquitous in giant elliptical galaxies.
The mass deficit is defined as the amount of mass that was removed in creating the core. Mathematically, the mass deficit is defined as
where "ρ"i is the original density, "ρ" is the observed density, and "R"c is the core radius. In practice, the core-Sersic model can be used to help quantify the deficits.
Observed mass deficits are typically in the range of one to a few times the mass of the central SMBH, and observed core radii are comparable to the influence radii of the central SMBH. These properties are consistent with what is predicted in theoretical models of core formation and lend support to the hypothesis that all bright galaxies once contained binary SMBHs at their centers.
It is not known whether most galaxies still contain massive binaries, or whether the two black holes have coalesced. Both possibilities are consistent with the presence of mass deficits.


Wonders of the Solar System

Wonders of the Solar System is a 2010 television series co-produced by the BBC and Science Channel, and hosted by physicist Brian Cox. "Wonders of the Solar System" was first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two on 7 March 2010. The series comprises five episodes, each of which focuses on an aspect of the Solar System and features a 'wonder' relevant to the theme. The series was described as one of the most successful to appear on BBC Two in recent years. An accompanying book with the same name was also published.
On 31 March 2011, the series won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in documentary film-making.
Episodes.
1. "Empire of the Sun".
The first episode illustrates how the formation and behaviour of the Sun affects each planet in the Solar System. During this episode, Cox visits India to view and explain the workings of a total solar eclipse and the partial eclipses that occur on other planets. He travels to the Iguazu Falls to relate the causality between river levels, and sunspot fluctuations. An explanation of the Earth's exposure to the power of the Sun occurs in Death Valley, California, US, with an experiment inspired by John Herschel's actinometer. He also travels to Norway to observe and explain the defensive role of the Earth's magnetosphere against the Sun's solar wind and its role in forming the Aurora Borealis. Cox then relates the Voyager missions and their continuing exploration of the massive reach of the Sun's gravitational forces on objects in the farthest regions of the Solar System. Finally, in the clear skies of the Atacama Desert, at the Paranal Observatory he is able to observe, with the naked eye, the myriad of stars on the Milky Way and relates the meaning of their diverse colours as mapped on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram.
2. "Order Out of Chaos".
Cox starts this episode in Al-Qayrawan, Tunisia to analyse the orbit of the planets around our Sun, with details on how the 23-degree tilt of the Earth creates the seasonal weather patterns. He also visits the Atlas Mountains, and relates how in clear night skies the ancients observed the rotation of the stars and the retrograde and prograde motion of Mars and the other wandering planets. In Oklahoma, US, he discusses the universal reach of the Coriolis effect and the importance of the conservation of angular momentum. Next, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he examines how the "Cassini–Huygens" space-probe's imagery provides an insight on the highly complex structure of the ice rings of Saturn, and its diverse array of moons, and how they can reveal insights into the formation and evolution of the Solar System. He also explains how Enceladus, as the most reflective object in the known universe, has been of interest due to its continental divide-like canyons and geysers (as also observed in parts of Iceland). In the Sahara Desert the formative effect of winds on sand-dune morphology is paralleled to that of the gravitational effect of Saturn's 61 known moons on the matter that composite the rings - a phenomenon called orbital resonance.
3. "The Thin Blue Line".
The third episode looks at the atmosphere of the planets and moons of the Solar System, with Earth, Mars, and Venus being the main focus. The episode starts with Cox travelling to South Africa and taking a journey in an English Electric Lightning up to an altitude of 18 kilometres where the "thinness and fragility" of the atmosphere could be observed in the middle of the day. This is then contrasted with the planet-wide consequences of Mercury's depleted, and Venus' broiling greenhouse atmospheres. Later, the dunal morphology of the Namib Desert is compared to what is known of the surface and depleted atmosphere of Mars, and is used to give an explanation of how the Earth maintains its temperature. Cox then explains how the damaging effect of the Sun's solar wind is deflected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Next, he discusses the transformative effect of weather on a planet's surface, such as the global dust-storms on Mars or the electrical-storms of Jupiter. The episode continues with an in-depth comparison of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, using data gained from the "Huygens" probe's January 2005 descent down to the frigid methane surface of the moon. It ends with Cox comparing Earth's hydrological cycle with Titan's methanological one.
4. "Dead or Alive".
The fourth episode begins at the Grand Canyon, Arizona, US, where Cox draws comparisons of the canyon to Mars and the massive Valles Marineris. A trip to Kīlauea on Hawaii shows the constant geological activity of Earth, and again a comparison to Mars and the massive Olympus Mons is seen. Both comparisons are insightful in the sense that Earth's systems are still dynamic and active whereas Mars' have gradually slowed into inactivity. Cox then switches view closer to the Sun and the scorched greenhouse planet Venus, a planet often referred to as "Earth's twin", and compares it to the vulcan geology of the Deccan Plateau. An example of Earth's interconnectivity with the Solar System reveals that Jupiter's gravitational effect could potentially send an asteroid through the Asteroid Belt on a collision course with Earth, as evidenced by Meteor Crater. The same gravitational force is also shown to give the Jovian moon Io geological life (given the absence of meteor impact evidence there) as paralleled by the volcanism of Erta Ale in Ethiopia. All in all, with the universal laws of physics at play throughout the solar system, its interconnectedness can also be seen.
5. "Aliens".
The final installment covers life surviving in extreme environments, and how the search for life on other worlds follows the search for water. Cox begins by travelling to the deep ocean to draw comparisons between life in the hostile conditions of the deep seabed (on the submersible DSV Alvin) and the parallel potential of non-Earth life. The absence of life-sustaining water in the Atacama Desert in South America is also viewed, which is cited to explain the lack of even basic microbial life there. A trip to the Scablands in North-West America is also made, with an explanation of the Missoula Floods that once occurred there, and how the tell-tale signature of water shaped the landscape geologically. The exploration of Mars has revealed possible evidence of its subterranean hydrology, and a visit to the Cueva de Villa Luz in Mexico shows how simple life-forms (such as archaea and snottites) survive in hostile conditions beneath the Earth. Conversely, the hostile frozen topography of Jupiter's moon Europa also reveals the presence and effects of sub-surface water, and Cox visits a cave in Vatnajökull to find microbial signs of life beneath the ice. Cox concludes by stating that Europa represents the "most fascinating and important alien world we know. A true wonder of the Solar System because it's our best hope of finding extraterrestrial life."
Merchandise.
An accompanying hardcover book was released on 30 September 2010: The region 1 DVD and Blu-ray discs were released on 7 September 2010. The region 2 DVD and Blu-ray discs of the series were released on 12 April 2010. The region 4 DVD and Blu-ray discs were released on 7 April 2011.
New series.
Brian Cox from his Twitter account stated that there would be a second series, "Wonders of the Universe", with the same crew and BBC science team. It was first broadcast on 6 March 2011 in the UK. The second series has a similar basis to series one, but features the universe. The new series consisted of four episodes as opposed to the previous five.


Ruth J. Northcott

Ruth Josephine Northcott (March 6, 1913 – July 29, 1969) was a Canadian astronomer based at the David Dunlap Observatory, and president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada from 1962 to 1964. Asteroid is named for her.
Early life.
Ruth Josephine Northcott was born in Solina, Ontario. She attended the University of Toronto, graduating in 1934, and earning a master's degree in 1935.
Career.
When the David Dunlap Observatory opened in 1935, Ruth Northcott was part of the starting staff, initially as a research assistant. She later held the rank of Lecturer, and then Associate Professor of Astronomy. She was elected to membership in the International Astronomical Union in 1952, and served on the IAU's committee on the history of astronomy. She was also an active member of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, and she helped to found the Richmond Hill Naturalists.
She was especially active in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), serving as president of the Toronto Centre during World War II, and as third woman elected president of the national society, in 1962 and 1963, and as a member of the executive committee from 1965. She was assistant editor of the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada beginning in 1951, and became the journal's editor in 1956. She won the RASC Service Award in 1967. She was editor of RASC's "The Observer's Handbook" (1968), a manual for amateur astronomers, and "Astronomy in Canada: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" (1967).
Her research involved variable stars, binary stars, and spectroscopy, but she wrote on a variety of topics for the RASC journal, including "The Visibility of the Planet Mercury" (1965). "I get a great deal of pleasure and a certain degree of excitement from investigating the stars," she told a Winnipeg newspaper in 1962.
Personal life.
Ruth J. Northcott died in 1969, aged 56 years. Fellow astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was executor of Northcott's estate. Many of Northcott's papers and photographs are in the University of Toronto Archives. There is a biennial Ruth Northcott Memorial Lecture presented by RASC. Asteroid , discovered in 1983, is named for her.


James Clark Ross

Sir James Clark Ross (15 April 1800 – 3 April 1862) was a British Royal Navy officer and polar explorer known for his explorations of the Arctic, participating in two expeditions led by his uncle Sir John Ross, and four led by Sir William Parry, and, in particular, for his own Antarctic expedition from 1839 to 1843.
Biography.
Arctic exploration.
Ross was born in London, the nephew of Sir John Ross, under whom he entered the Royal Navy in 1812, accompanying him on Sir John's first Arctic voyage in search of a Northwest Passage in 1818. Between 1819 and 1827, Ross took part in four Arctic expeditions under Sir William Parry, and in 1829 to 1833, again served under his uncle on Sir John's second Arctic voyage. It was during this trip that a small party led by James Ross (including Thomas Abernethy) located the position of the North Magnetic Pole on 1 June 1831, on the Boothia Peninsula in the far north of Canada. It was on this trip, too, that Ross charted the Beaufort Islands, later renamed Clarence Islands by his uncle.
In 1834, Ross was promoted to captain. In December 1835, he offered his services to the Admiralty to resupply 11 whaling ships which had become trapped in Baffin Bay. They accepted his offer, and he set sail in HMS "Cove" in January 1836. The crossing was difficult, and by the time he had reached the last known position of the whalers in June, all but one had managed to return home. Ross found no trace of this last vessel, "William Torr", which was probably crushed in the ice in December 1835. He returned to Hull in September 1836 with all his crew in good health.
From 1835 to 1839, except for his voyage with "Cove," he conducted a magnetic survey of Great Britain with Sir Edward Sabine.
Antarctic exploration.
Between 1839 and 1843, Ross commanded on his own Antarctic expedition and charted much of the continent's coastline. Captain Francis Crozier was second-in-command of the expedition, commanding . Support for the expedition had been arranged by Francis Beaufort, hydrographer of the Navy and a member of several scientific societies. On the expedition was Joseph Dalton Hooker, who had been invited along as assistant ship's surgeon. "Erebus" and "Terror" were bomb vessels—an unusual type of warship named after the mortar bombs they were designed to fire and constructed with extremely strong hulls, to withstand the recoil of the heavy weapons. The ships were selected for the Antarctic mission as being able to resist thick ice, as proved true in practice.
In 1841, James Ross discovered the Ross Sea, Victoria Land, and the volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, which were named for the expedition's vessels. They sailed for along the edge of the low, flat-topped ice shelf they called variously the Barrier or the Great Ice Barrier, later named the Ross Ice Shelf in his honour. The following year, he attempted to penetrate south at about 55° W, and explored the eastern side of what is now known as James Ross Island, discovering and naming Snow Hill Island and Seymour Island.
Ross reported that Admiralty Sound appeared to him to have been blocked by glaciers at its southern end. Ross's ships arrived back in England on 4 September 1843. He was awarded the Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations in 1843, knighted in 1844, and elected to the Royal Society in 1848.
Search for Franklin's lost expedition.

Pygope

Pygope is an extinct genus of brachiopods belonging to the family Pygopidae. These brachiopods lived in open sea from the Jurassic Period, Kimmeridgian age (152.1–157.3 mya) up to Cretaceous Period, Barremian age (125.0–~129.4 mya). Some of the species are characterised by a smaller or larger perforation through the entire shell in older specimens, while others just have a depression somewhere on the midline. Younger specimens of the perforated species develop a heart-shape and subsequently both extensions merge, thus encircling a central passage which is in fact entirely outside the shell.


Echiurophilus

Echiurophilus is a genus of cyclopoid copepods in the family Echiurophilidae, the sole genus of the family. There are at least two described species in "Echiurophilus".
Species.
These two species belong to the genus "Echiurophilus":


Monocelididae

Monocelididae is family of marine turbellarian flatworms in the order Proseriata, sub order Lithophora.


Dictyonellidae

Dictyonellidae is a family of sponges in the order Bubarida.


Orang Pendek

In Indonesian folklore, the Orang Pendek (Indonesian for 'short person') is the most common name given to a creature said to inhabit remote, mountainous forests on the island of Sumatra. The animal has allegedly been seen and documented for at least 100 years by forest tribes, local villagers, Dutch colonists, and Western scientists and travelers. Consensus among witnesses is that the animal is a ground-dwelling, bipedal primate covered in short fur, standing between 80 and 150 cm (30 and 60 in) tall.
Location.
While Orang Pendek and similar animals have historically been said to dwell in the landscapes of Sumatra in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia, claimed sightings have occurred largely within the Kerinci Regency of central Sumatra and especially within the borders of Kerinci Seblat National Park ("Taman Nasional Kerinci Seblat" or TNKS). The park, 2° south of the equator, is located within the Bukit Barisan mountain range and features some of the most remote primary rainforest in the world. Habitat types within the park include lowland dipterocarp rainforest, montane forests, and volcanic alpine formations on Mount Kerinci, the second highest peak in Indonesia.
Attestations.
The following sources make reference to the purported creature:
Suku Anak Dalam.
The Suku Anak Dalam ("Children of the Inner-forest") – also known as Orang Kubu, Orang Batin Simbilan, or Orang Rimba—are groups of nomadic people who have traditionally lived throughout the lowland forests of Jambi and South Sumatra. According to their legends, Orang Pendek has been a part of their world and a co-inhabitant of the forest for centuries.
In Bukit Duabelas, the Orang Rimba speak of a creature, known as "Hantu Pendek," whose description closely matches that of Orang Pendek. However, Hantu Pendek is thought of more as a supernatural entity or demon rather than an animal, with the name translating to "short ghost." According to the Orang Rimba, the Hantu Pendek travel in groups of five or six, subsisting off wild yams and hunting animals with small axes. Accounts of the creature claim it ambushes unfortunate Orang Rimba hunters traveling alone in the forest. Along the Makekal River on the western edge of Bukit Duabelas, people recount a legend of how their ancestors outsmarted these cunning yet dim-witted creatures during a hunting trip, and the story is often used to boast of their intellect and reason.
Dutch colonists.
Dutch settlers in the early 20th century provided Westerners with their modern introduction to Orang Pendek-like animals in Sumatra. One account in particular is widely reported:
I discovered a dark and hairy creature on a branch... The sedapa was also hairy on the front of its body; the colour there was a little lighter than on the back. The very dark hair on its head fell to just below the shoulder-blades or even almost to the waist... Had it been standing, its arms would have reached to a little above its knees; they were therefore long, but its legs seemed to me rather short. I did not see its feet, but I did see some toes which were shaped in a very normal manner... There was nothing repulsive or ugly about its face, nor was it at all apelike.


Frank Peabody

Frank Elmer Peabody (28 August 1914 - 27 June 1958), was an American palaeontologist noted for his research on fossil trackways and reptile and amphibian skeletal structure.
He attended high school and junior college in the San Francisco Bay Area. His undergraduate studies were completed at the University of California in 1938 and in 1940 he was awarded an M.A. in paleontology. While working at the University of California, Berkeley he came under the tutelage of Professor Charles Lewis Camp from whom he inherited a passion for vertebrate phylogenetic problems. Peabody and fellow student Sam P. Welles helped Camp with his research on the North American Triassic with their work at the Moenkopi Formation, the Dinosaur National Monument sandstones, and the Kayenta Formation.
During World War II Peabody worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and finished his doctorate at the University of California in 1946. He accompanied the University of California South African Expedition in 1947-1948 as Senior Paleontologist. He and Charles Camp excavated at Gladysvale Cave and nearby Bolt's Farm. Subsequently they visited the Northern Transvaal and Mozambique in their search for specimens. The expedition also visited Wonderwerk Cave in Northern Cape Province.
Charles Camp, Joseph T. Gregory, and Frank Peabody were interested in the histology of fossil bones, and prepared numerous sections to compare their structures with those of modern mammals. This slide collection continues to be useful.
Peabody later became Instructor in Zoology at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. The fossils he excavated near Garnett, Kansas, were source material for his work on the earliest known reptiles. Until his untimely death of a heart attack in 1958, his interests included the evolution, osteology, and ecology of the Garnett fossil reptiles. Shortly before his death he was awarded a National Science Foundation research grant.
Peabody was married to wife Anna for 20 years and they had three children.


Paraspirifer

Paraspirifer is a genus of large brachiopods (up to about ) that lived during the late Lower and Middle Devonian in what now are Germany, Spain, Morocco and the United States (New York State and Ohio).
Taxonomy.
"Paraspirifer" developed from "Brachyspirifer" during the early upper Emsian (cancellata-elegans/Dalehe Event).
Distribution.
"Paraspirifer" originated in the lower upper Emsian and became extinct in Europe and Northern Africa at the end of the lower Eifelian. It survived into the Givetian in North America though.
Ecology.
From the type of deposits that contain "Paraspirifer bownockeri" it can be deduced that this species inhabited soft clay mudflats. Shells of this species hosted a wide range of epibionts, such as bryozoans, corals, echinoderms, annelid worms and other brachiopods. These epibionts are more numerous on the brachial valve than on the pedunculate valve, because this big brachiopod lay on its pedunculate valve after the degeneration of the stalk.