MARK TERRILL ~

In our 'bus-ticket' series of booklets where Mark is no stranger — more prose poems from the master word whittler

Three color booklet of new poems

by Mark in fold-out splendor.

Both signed and unsigned editions.
from Longhouse

Signed limited edition $15.
Unsigned $10

(International orders kindly inquire)

order here through Paypal with free shipping

The Other Side

Unsigned $10.00 USD    Signed $15.00 USD

LONGHOUSE BIBLIOGRAPHY 2011 ~

        LONGHOUSE BIBLIOGRAPHY PART FOUR ~ 2011 ~         

An early issue from Longhouse when it was initially "Workshop" and even before that "Our Poets Workshop". Shown here is from 1975.

2011

: so much for wanting to write (today) a marathon short commentary on all the final leg of the Longhouse Bibliography, the 2008-2012 years. Instead I opened the day's mail and there was a new book by John Brandi and Steve Sanfield (sent by Steve with other loose poems of Steve's packed in there). I got further serious and started planning a postcard by Steve of one of his poems, plus a small booklet of poems from a series on the Gulf War district, or somewhere in that bedlam. We designed and printed the postcard the next morning and shipped them to Steve. The booklet to follow, and more on all of this when we get there at the July 2012 segment of the bibliography. On with the show!

2011. Bob Arnold. A Possible Eden 2. Bob Arnold’s second book of modern fables. With two paintings by the author. Three color text. Hand-sewn wraps. 40 pages.

: A Possible Eden 2 is the second volume of prose poems I had written over the previous winter & spring. Prose poems are a good habit of mine that occur in bunches and often at the onset of Spring. Or thinking of Spring welled up deep in winter.

2011. Bob Arnold. Bigger Than You. New poems from the woods, river and beloved. All wrapped in decorative Nepalese wraps. Very limited. 

: another small book of new short poems, handmade and maybe 30 or so copies sent out mainly to friends or those sending a book gift at the same time as the book is being made — share and share alike. The cover wrap is more lovely embossed natural pressed plants and flowers.

2011. Bob Arnold. Forever. 20 new poems by Bob in this handmade pocket-size companion with Himalayan wraps. One of only 50. Stapled wraps 

: and one more. The title says it.

2011. Bob Arnold. Yokel, A Long Green Mountain Poem . New, perfect bound wraps, 156 pages. A small portion of this first appeared in Backwoods Broadside edited by Sylvester Pollet.

: Yokel had a few early appearances and took a great deal of time to get it all fitted right. Since I am still living in the same place as the subject matter and characters, and that back country life is disappearing, I was making celebratory poems and portraits of individuals and occasions right along with elegies and goodbye pieces to those passed on. Those I worked with and saw go. It's the first book in a trilogy that spans 40 years called Woodlanders. I'll speak to the second volume (love poems) when we get there. Someone could say these are love poems as well.

2011. John Bradley. Amongst the Turks. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. Pamphlet

 
: with travel poems and photographs from Turkey by John, this is a smaller foldout booklet. John and Jana traveled for a portion of the summer and on their return John just sent poems he had coming to him (day by day) as a sharing, but I could see they would be mounting into a booklet. So it happened.

2011. John Bradley. Fordtopia . In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet. 

: all Henry Ford and his era and expanse and inventions and what was happening with our country all at the same time. A few photographs have been slipped in to grease the gears. John's uncanny ability to steer poetry and historical subjects into Bradley made poems.

2011. Hanne Bramness / with photographs by Ina Otzko. A Calendar In Colour. Three-color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. Limited edition. 

: Hanne's third Longhouse booklet following the year's calendar with photographs and poems to match. What I had put aside from one of my handmade books I can see went into Hanne's cover wrap. Ina Otzko was kind enough to share her photographs throughout the booklet.

2011. Susan Briante. $INDU or Ghost Numbers. In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet. 

: Susan looking over and shaking down the US financial district, with sidelight commentary on all contributors in her open field vision. Susan's manuscript arrived with her husband's Farid (up coming) and together we designed and built a family, with their new baby, two booklets shipped to Texas.

2011. Mary Ann Cain. The Water Diaries. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. Pamphlet

: Mary Ann's complexities of body, soul and landscape brought into view by this foldout of prose reverie, written on the high crest of Colorado (since burned over) and all about a re-building, while holding on.

2011. Thomas A Clark. By The Rock Garden. A tall but narrow road broadside ready to frame from the poet's visit to Ryoanji, Kyoto with photograph by Laurie Clark.

: Tom in the Japanese garden. It looks folded but its appearance is one tall broadside. Someone wrote to me after seeing the photograph of Tom in the famed garden and asked, "How'd he get to be there all alone?!" That's Tom.

2011. Byron Coley. Beefheart. Three-color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. Limited edition. Very limited. 

: I already can't remember if Byron sent this to me, or someone else did, but Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) has always been close to us all. The musician and the artist. So the week he passed away we printed this up and got it to all parties onetwothree. Susan's second cousin is Don Van Vliet's wife, Janet. She always liked Janet, but when she saw Captain Beefheart perform in the 60s, no dice.

2011. Cid Corman. Chop. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. Pamphlet

: in our wish to publish something by Cid every year from the press, Chop is here showcasing Cid's many uses for the handstamps he used on all his correspondence, often on the outside envelope or blue aerogramme. His widow Shizumi gave to me the ink stamps, all that I had seen during my long correspondence with Cid, and it seemed right and lively to share them all further.

2011. Merrill Gilfillan. Warbler Haibun. New poem sequence in fold-out fashion in forest wraps with band. Signed by the poet

: the second Longhouse publication by Merrill, this time shorter (haibun) in a foldout method of hearing the bird sing.

2011. Ray Gonzalez. The Mud Angels, Mesilla, New Mexico. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. . Pamphlet

: Ray came our way via mutual friend George Kalamaras (we all have a three way zing for music, particularly Gene Clark and others) and while a bit crowded for the format, it all resonates and thensome. I could have made two booklets with all the good poems I had from Ray.

2011. Whit Griffin. Cathedral Ring. In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet. 

: Whit's second Longhouse booklet, and this time a taller design with some of Whit's photographs (often taken off his cellphone no matter where he might be) all taking part. Just look at the blossoms of that tree! You're in Tennessee.

2011. Ken Letko. Forgotten Inventors. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. Pamphlet

: Ken's poems just played with me nicely as I read, and a sizable group easily fell into place to make a booklet. This effortless is hard work.

2011. Li Po / translated by J. P. Seaton. Fall River Song. A three color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. 

 

: every Sandy booklet of Chinese translations is my favorite, but this one may take the cake. We had just the paper wrap for the cover, and it had taken awhile for us both to finally get to the place where Li Po just had to show up in the Longhouse title family. I'm very partial to the Han Shan booklet we all did as well. Close my eyes on some days, choose one.

2011. Gerry Loose. "Every Year..." . Gerry as always thinking like a tree, plant or bush! A walker of the landscape. Here is a postcard poem to share. Signed by the poet on own small bookplate, ideal to frame 

: this poem is the Gerry I know. I never feel I am inside anywhere when I read his poems. Always outdoors.

2011. Bob Love. Saskatchewan Waters. A three color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band.

: Bob is a logger in big sky Montana and came my way via his teacher, from long ago, the poet Ken McCullough. I received a bunch of poems from Bob, and while the logging poems are quite fine, there was something exploratory and of a different adventure on a fishing trip with Bob in Canada. One day in the mail, after we published this booklet, came a tangle of sweet grass from Bob and his wife — an aroma to fill the room.

2011. Antonio Machado / Alvaro Cardona-Hine. The Pocket Book Machado. A beautifully packed packet of poems from the master with photograph done-up new by New Mexico's own Alvaro Cardona-Hine. Three-color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. Limited edition.

: we weren't done with Alvaro, now well into his 80's, not by a long shot. Along with his own poems and paintings, he also translates, and Machado quite well.

2011. Joseph Massey. Another Rehearsal for Morning. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. . Pamphlet. Fold-out booklet. Our third publication by this poet. 

: same with Joe, one more booklet, so carefully sculptured between us.

2011. Farid Matuk. Riverside. In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet. 

: Farid's gritty and true poems covering the wider planet he sees and wishes to protect. Some of this work first started out with us and Farid when I was editing ORIGIN, sixth series, and just maybe it was helped along by the good guidance of Dale Smith and Brooks Johnson. The best poets push other poets forward.

2011. Ken McCullough. Diet For The Smallest Planet. In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet. 

: I've long admired Ken's poems and we had already done one shorter booklet together; it was time for something larger. The poems here throw good weight between Montana, Cambodia (Ken also translates from the language) and elsewhere. He writes, "Most of my life I've been eating shit", but it's not what we read, far from it, when we have his poems.

2011. Mohammed Mrabet. / translated by Mark Terrill. "The Canary". Three color 4-1/4 x
6 postcard suitable for framing or slipping into the mail. 

~ Mohammed Mrabet ~

: Mark coming through with this poem amongst maybe many he sent at one time and I let this one slip right down onto my lap to read again and again, which we then did up as a postcard. Once upon a time Mark knew and visited Paul Bowles and he brought some essentials away.

2011. Shin Yu Pai. Nearly Invisible. A three color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. 

: I had already worked with Shin Yu Pai and her poems in the ORIGIN, sixth series and wanted to see more and she gladly complied. A unique poet so quietly in the room with us all.

2011. Mark Terrill. Up All Night. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. Pamphlet

: when Mark isn't writing poems, stories, essays, reviews, reading books and getting into trouble with all his cats, he's kicking around his German neighborhood with sketch pad and charcoal, and when he travels away from home, too. We made here some of the poems with some of the sketches. It's my favorite Terrill.

2011. U Sam Oeur. translated from Khmer with Ken McCullough. Ever Hopeful. In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet.

: while organizing a booklet with Ken, I had in the back of my head his deep resource translations of U Sam Oeur. I had already seen a few of his books and would very much like to have more stemming from Longhouse. We asked and we received from the hands of the translator.

2011. Janine Pommy Vega. Walking Woman With The Tambourine. In three-color fold out performance. Pamphlet. 

: these are poems Janine Pommy Vega was working on at her death (toward a new book) and put into our hands. It's another of our larger and fatter foldout booklets with some of Janine's best long poems ever. Slowly but surely this will all evolve into a much larger book of Janine's singing and praises.

2011. Karma Tenzing Wangchuk. Holding My Breath. A three color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. 

: Tenzing often writes to me by short email messages out there in the coastal pot of Port Townsend, home to thousands of poets and mountains. His short poems are brilliant for common locality and touch. He continues the long tradition made once by wanderers.

2011. J. D. Whitney. Other Cousins. In three-color fold out performance. Very limited. Pamphlet. Fold-out booklet. Our second publication by this poet. 

: J.D. is the skilled mathematician of language and earth and all those on it, particularly the forgotten, neglected and lost. This is the second booklet from Longhouse of J.D.'s "cousins" who are often mine. We write to one another every day without fail and have yet to meet. Can you imagine that day! (Now I can — it happened this past September 2012).

2011. Finn Wilcox, Freight Train. Three-color fold-out booklet of poems with wrap around band. Limited edition. 

: Finn Wilcox is what I hope the world will one day turn into — a good guy with a good heart and good hands put into the good earth. Treeplanter, hobo, train man, father, lover, husband, neighbor, family man, friend. He knows his train poems are going to be my train poems, too.

© 2012 Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers

___________________

Longhouse Bibliography:


http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bibliography1.html

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bibliography2.html

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bibliography3.html

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bibliography3b.html

 

HELLO ~

A donkey walks along the snowy hills above the Glens of Antrim, Northern Ireland, as the cold snap continues to sweep the UK.

 Photograph: Paul Faith/PA

 

 

 

 

 

the guardian (uk)

 

 

 

 

  

MALCOLM RITCHIE ~

Malcolm Ritchie's second Longhouse chaplet straight from the heart of Scotland where he is in reclusion

Three color booklet of new poems

by Malcolm in fold-out splendor.

Both signed and unsigned editions.
from Longhouse

Signed limited edition $15.
Unsigned $12

(International orders kindly inquire)

order here through Paypal with free shipping

In These Lines

Unsigned $12.00 USD    Signed $17.00 USD

 

SINCERITY ~
(UNSCRIPTED)

After all the pomp & ceremony of the Inaugural 2013, climbing the regal stairs out with all US royalty, President Barack Obama stopped and took a moment to have one more look out at the people, the crowd, the landscape. One could see the young man heart of Obama here, as we have after the Sandy Hook killings etc. It's all timing and knowing when to turn, when to take a moment, and this man does.

TRAIL ~

Mushers at the Grande Odyssee sledding race.

La Grande Odyssée Savoie Mont Blanc is an international sled dog race spanning 900 kilometres (560 mi) in French Alps and Swiss Alps. 

 Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP






 

BERTIE  KOLLER ~

(we've tried our best to get this song to show & play but it's resisting, sorry to say
check out here:)

 https://soundcloud.com/bertiekoller 
 

Bertie is the son of Leslie Burhoe and the poet Jim Koller and he's been playing music, working as a carpenter, a married man and father up in Maine for a good long time now. I last saw him when he joined his father and I at reading on the street to raise awareness and some funds for Hurricane Katrina. Jim brought some books to read out of, Bert brought his guitar. Both guys wore warm coats. The other day as a New Year approached Bert sent down to us his latest CD. I liked it as soon as it started up. "Enough is Enough" is the second song on the playlist, but I could have chosen any of the fifteen songs. Here's more :

http://bertiekoller.com/blog/

Maine Music Featuring Bertie Koller from LCTV on Vimeo.

JOAN ~

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_Joan_of_Arc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9e_Jeanne_Falconetti

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc

Directed by Carl Dreyer

OUR EARTH, OUR SOULS ~

As the saying goes, we don't get out of this life alive — and neither will the Earth. Around 5 billion years from now, give or take, the sun will expand into a red giant, absorbing all the inner planets back into its fiery womb. At that point, water ice will thaw on Saturn's moon Titan, where the temperature is currently —290 degrees F, and some interesting things may eventually crawl out of its methane lakes. One of them, pawing through organic silt, might come across the Huygens probe that parachuted there from the Cassini space mission in January, 2005, which, during its descent, and for 90 minutes before its batteries died, sent us pictures of streambed-like channels cutting down from orange, pebbled highlands to Titan's sand-dune seas.

Sadly, whatever finds Huygens won't have any clue where it came from, or that we once existed. Bickering among project directors at NASA nixed a plan to include a graphic explanation that Jon Lomberg designed, this time encased in a diamond that would preserve a shred of our story at least 5 billion years — long enough for evolution to provide another audience.

More crucial to us still on Earth, right now, is whether we humans can make it through what many scientists call this planet's latest great extinction — make it through, and bring the rest of Life with us rather than tear it down. The natural history lesson we read in both the fossil and the living records suggests that we can't go it alone for very long.

. . .

Since the late 19th century, when, beginning with electrons, we got down to manipulating the most fundamental particles of the universe, human life has changed very fast. One measure of how fast is that, barely a century ago — until Marconi's wireless and Edison's phonograph — all the music ever heard on earth was live. Today, a tiny fraction of 1 percent is. The rest is electronically reproduced or broadcast, along with a trillion words and images each day.

Those radio waves don't die — like light, they travel on. The human brain also emanates electric impulses at very low frequencies: similar to, but far weaker than, the radio waves used to communicate with submarines. Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen.

That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.

The emanations from our rains, like radio waves, must also keep going — where? Space is now described as an expanding bubble, but that architecture is still a theory. Along its great mysterious interstellar curvatures, perhaps it's not unreasonable to think that our thought waves might eventually find their way back here.

Or even that one day — long after we're gone, unbearably lonely for the beautiful world from which we so foolishly banished ourselves — we, or our memories, might surf home aboard a electromagnetic wave to haunt or beloved Earth.

 _______________________________________

from The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
(St. Martin's Press, 2007)

2012 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

 

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a rare view of a pair of overlapping galaxies, called NGC 3314. The two galaxies appear to be colliding, but they are actually separated by tens of millions of light-years, or about ten times the distance between our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The chance alignment of the two galaxies, as seen from Earth, gives a unique look at the silhouetted spiral arms in the closer face-on spiral, NGC 3314A. The motion of the two galaxies indicates that they are both relatively undisturbed and that they are moving in markedly different directions. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and W. Keel, University of Alabama)

The star HD 44179 is surrounded by an extraordinary structure known as the Red Rectangle. It acquired its moniker because of its shape and its apparent color when seen in early images from Earth. This strikingly detailed Hubble image reveals how, when seen from space, the nebula, rather than being rectangular, is shaped like an X with additional complex structures of spaced lines of glowing gas, a little like the rungs of a ladder. The star at the center is similar to the Sun, but at the end of its lifetime, pumping out gas and other material to make the nebula, and giving it the distinctive shape. It also appears that the star is a close binary that is surrounded by a dense torus of dust -- both of which may help to explain the very curious shape. The Red Rectangle is an unusual example of what is known as a proto-planetary nebula. These are old stars, on their way to becoming planetary nebulae. Once the expulsion of mass is complete a very hot white dwarf star will remain and its brilliant ultraviolet radiation will cause the surrounding gas to glow. The Red Rectangle is found about 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn). (ESA/Hubble and NASA)  

A small portion of the Carina Nebula, one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air. (NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team, STScI) 

 

Jupiter's volcanic moon Io passing above the turbulent clouds of the giant planet, on July 24, 1996. The conspicuous black spot on Jupiter is Io's shadow. The shadow is about the same size as Io (3,640 kilometers or 2,262 miles across) and sweeps across the face of Jupiter at 17 kilometers per second (38,000 miles per hour). The smallest details visible on Io and Jupiter are about 100 miles across. Bright patches visible on Io are regions of sulfur dioxide frost (J. Spencer, Lowell Observatory, and NASA)

 

Resembling comets streaking across the sky, these four speedy stars are plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas, creating brilliant arrowhead structures and trailing tails of glowing gas. The stars in these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images are among 14 young runaway stars spotted by the Advanced Camera for Surveys between October 2005 and July 2006. (NASA, ESA, and R. Sahai, NASA/JPL) 

 

The full beauty of the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), seen in a detailed view from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), showing a bull's eye pattern of eleven or even more concentric rings, or shells, around the Cat's Eye. Each 'ring' is actually the edge of a spherical bubble seen projected onto the sky -- that's why it appears bright along its outer edge. Observations suggest the star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. These convulsions created dust shells, each of which contain as much mass as all of the planets in our solar system combined (still only one percent of the Sun's mass). These concentric shells make a layered, onion-skin structure around the dying star. The view from Hubble is like seeing an onion cut in half, where each skin layer is discernible. (NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA) 

 

This object, known as Messier 54, could be just another globular cluster, but this dense and faint group of stars was in fact the first globular cluster found that lies outside our own galaxy. Discovered by the famous astronomer Charles Messier in 1778, Messier 54 belongs to a satellite of the Milky Way called the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy. Messier had no idea of the significance of his discovery at the time, and it wasn't until over two centuries later, in 1994, that astronomers found Messier 54 to be part of the miniature galaxy and not our own. Current estimates indicate that the Sagittarius dwarf, and hence the cluster, is situated almost 90,000 light-years away -- more than three times as far from the center of our galaxy than the Solar System. Ironically, even though this globular cluster is now understood to lie outside the Milky Way, it will actually become part of it in the future. The strong gravitational pull of our galaxy is slowly engulfing the Sagittarius dwarf, which will eventually merge with the Milky Way creating one much larger galaxy. (ESA/Hubble & NASA) 

 

The newest candidate for Most Distant Galaxy Yet Known. This newly discovered galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, is very young and only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way. The object is observed 420 million years after the big bang, when the universe was 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. The inset shows a close-up of the young dwarf galaxy. This is the latest discovery from a large program that uses massive clusters of galaxies as natural zoom lenses to reveal distant galaxies in the early universe. Called the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH), the program allows astronomers to use the gravity of massive galaxy clusters to magnify distant galaxies behind them, an effect called gravitational lensing. In this Hubble observation, astronomers used the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647+7015 as the giant cosmic telescope. The bright yellow galaxies near the center of the image are cluster members. The cluster's gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making its image appear approximately eight times brighter than it otherwise would (NASA, ESA, M. Postman and D. Coe (STScI), and the CLASH Team) 

 

 NGC 1999, a dust filled bright nebula surrounding a vast hole of empty space in the constellation Orion. Hubble Heritage astronomers, in collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to obtain this color image. (NASA/ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI) 

 

A Multi-Wavelength View of Radio Galaxy Hercules A. Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A illustrate the combined imaging power of two of astronomy's cutting-edge tools, the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3, and the recently upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico. Some two billion light-years away, the yellowish elliptical galaxy in the center of the image appears quite ordinary as seen by Hubble in visible wavelengths of light. The galaxy is roughly 1,000 times more massive than the Milky Way and harbors a 2.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole that is 1,000 times more massive than the black hole in the Milky Way. But the innocuous-looking galaxy, also known as 3C 348, has long been known as the brightest radio-emitting object in the constellation Hercules. Emitting nearly a billion times more power in radio wavelengths than our Sun, the galaxy is one of the brightest extragalactic radio sources in the entire sky. The VLA radio data reveal enormous, optically invisible jets that, at one-and-a-half million light-years wide, dwarf the visible galaxy from which they emerge. The jets are very-high-energy plasma beams, subatomic particles and magnetic fields shot at nearly the speed of light from the vicinity of the black hole. The outer portions of both jets show unusual ring-like structures suggesting a history of multiple outbursts from the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The innermost parts of the jets are not visible because of the extreme velocity of the material, which causes relativistic effects that beam the light away from us. Far from the galaxy, the jets become unstable and break up into the rings and wisps (NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

 

A composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This sweeping panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core. It offers a nearby laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often violent nuclear regions of other galaxies (NASA, ESA and Q.D. Wang UMASS, Amherst)

 

A nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars pinwheels about the yellow nucleus of an unusual galaxy known as Hoag's Object. This image captures a face-on view of the galaxy's ring of stars, revealing more detail than any existing photo of this object. The entire galaxy is about 120,000 light-years wide, which is slightly larger than our Milky Way Galaxy. The blue ring, which is dominated by clusters of young, massive stars, contrasts sharply with the yellow nucleus of mostly older stars. What appears to be a "gap" separating the two stellar populations may actually contain some star clusters that are almost too faint to see. Curiously, an object that bears an uncanny resemblance to Hoag's Object can be seen in the gap at the one o'clock position. The object is probably a background ring galaxy. (NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA) 

 

 

A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reported the discovery of a fifth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto on July 11, 2012. The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system. Provisionally designated S/2012 (134340) 1, or P5, the latest moon was detected in nine separate sets of images taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 26, 27, and 29, 2012 and July 7 and 9, 2012. This discovery increases the number of known moons orbiting Pluto to five. Pluto is at center, and, counterclockwise, from top left, are its moons Nix, P5 (very small), Hydra, Charon, and P4. (NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter, SETI Institute) 

 

A planetary nebula in the making of a proto-planetary nebula. A dying star (hidden behind dust and gas in the center of the nebula) has ejected massive amounts of gas. Parts of the gas have reached tremendous velocities of up to one-and-a-half million kilometers per hour. Shown in blue is light from hydrogen and ionised nitrogen arising from supersonic shocks where the gas stream rams into the surrounding material. (ESA & Valentin Bujarrabal, Observatorio Astronomico Nacional, Spain) 

 

 The giant elliptical galaxy in the center of this image is the most massive and brightest member of the galaxy cluster Abell 2261. Spanning a little more than one million light-years, the galaxy is about 10 times the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. The bloated galaxy is a member of an unusual class of galaxies with a diffuse core filled with a fog of starlight. Normally, astronomers would expect to see a concentrated peak of light around a central black hole. The Hubble observations revealed that the galaxy's puffy core, measuring about 10,000 light-years, is the largest yet seen. The observations present a mystery, and studies of this galaxy may provide insight into how black hole behavior may shape the cores of galaxies. The immense gravity of the galaxy warps the light passing by, smearing out the images of background galaxies, as seen by Hubble. (NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), T. Lauer (NOAO), and the CLASH team) 

 

Resembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea, this celestial object is actually just a pillar of gas and dust. Called the Cone Nebula (in NGC 2264) -- so named because in ground-based images it has a conical shape - this monstrous pillar resides in a turbulent star-forming region. This picture shows the upper 2.5 light-years of the Cone. The entire pillar is seven light-years long. (NASA, Holland Ford (JHU), the ACS Science Team and ESA)

 

 The barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073, found in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to be a similar barred spiral, and the study of galaxies such as NGC 1073 can help astronomers learn more about our celestial home. (NASA/ESA) 

 

NGC 3132 is a striking example of a planetary nebula. This expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star, is known to amateur astronomers in the southern hemisphere as the "Eight-Burst" or the "Southern Ring" Nebula (Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA/NASA/ESA) 

 

Herbig-Haro 110 is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets from the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen. This image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 and 2005 and the Wide Field Camera 3 in April 2011. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA)

 

Galaxies, galaxies everywhere - as far as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope can see. This view of thousands of galaxies is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. part of what is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a "deep" core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge. The Ultra Deep Field observations, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, represent a narrow, deep view of the cosmos. In ground-based photographs, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon) is largely empty. Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is so empty that only a handful of stars within the Milky Way galaxy can be seen in the image. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004. (NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team) 

 

This peculiar galaxy pair is called Arp 116. Arp 116 is composed of a giant elliptical galaxy known as Messier 60 (or M60) and a much smaller spiral galaxy, NGC 4647. M60 is the third brightest galaxy in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, a collection of more than 1,300 galaxies. M60 has a diameter of 120,000 light-years, and a mass of about one trillion times that of the Sun. A huge black hole of 4.5 billion solar masses lies at its center, one of the most massive black holes ever found. The faint bluish spiral galaxy NGC 4647 is about two-thirds of M60 in size and much lower in mass -- roughly the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Astronomers have long tried to determine whether these two galaxies are actually interacting. Although looking at them from Earth they overlap, there is no evidence of new star formation, which would be one of the clearest signs that the two galaxies are indeed interacting. However, recent studies of very detailed Hubble images suggest the onset of some tidal interaction between the two. M60 lies roughly 54 million light-years away from Earth; NGC 4647 is about 63 million light-years away. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration) 

 

First prize winner of the 2012 Hubble Hidden Treasures competition, image processing category. Josh Lake (USA) submitted this stunning image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. ESA/Hubble had previously published an image of an area just adjacent to this, based on observations by the same team. Josh took a different approach, producing a bold two-color image which contrasts the light from glowing hydrogen and nitrogen. The image is not in natural colors -- hydrogen and nitrogen produce almost indistinguishable shades of red light that our eyes would struggle to tell apart -- but Josh's processing separates them out into blue and red, dramatically highlighting the structure of the region. As well as narrowly topping the jury's vote, Josh Lake also won the public vote. (NASA/ESA/Josh Lake) 

 

Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, this is a close-up look at one of the brightest distant "magnified" galaxies in the universe known to date. It is one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, where the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy bends and amplifies the light of a more distant background galaxy. In this image the light from a distant galaxy, nearly 10 billion light-years away, has been warped into a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623. The galaxy cluster lies 5 billion light-years away. The background galaxy's image is not only stretched by the lensing, but split into multiple apparent images, across the upper left and at lower right. (NASA, ESA, J. Rigby, and K. Sharon, M. Gladders, and E. Wuyts, University of Chicago) 

 

A pair of one-half light-year long interstellar 'twisters' -- eerie funnels and twisted-rope structures - in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (M8) which lies 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. (A. Caulet ST-ECF, ESA, and NASA) 

 

The Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104). The galaxy's hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. This brilliant galaxy was named the Sombrero because of its resemblance to the broad rim and high-topped Mexican hat. At a relatively bright magnitude of +8, M104 is just beyond the limit of naked-eye visibility and is easily seen through small telescopes. The Sombrero lies at the southern edge of the rich Virgo cluster of galaxies and is one of the most massive objects in that group, equivalent to 800 billion suns. The galaxy is 50,000 light-years across and is located 28 million light-years from Earth. (NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)