Cloud Nurseries

I'm hitting you with the briefest of  cloud  blogs this overcast Saturday morning, the shortest piece I've posted since the time I didn't know what to say about dolls! The temptation was to write nothing at all (always a sound idea when you think you don't have anything remotely interesting to say); but then a nagging sense of duty combined with the Protestant work ethic bestirred me to put together prose, picture and poem - and the picture is possibly the best of the three (and certainly more eloquent than a thousand words).

Of all the varieties of cloud I could have written about, I'm going for the Magellanic Clouds, for out of such clouds future stars are born. There are two Magellanic Clouds, the Large (LMC) and the Small (SMC). Both are irregularly-shaped gas-rich clusters of matter orbiting around our own Milky Way, galaxies as satellites of a galaxy - how fascinating is that? They are most easily visible from the southern hemisphere and have featured in the folklore of Africa, Asia and the antipodes for thousands of years.

I like to think of the Magellanic Clouds as nurseries in which new worlds are being gestated - or more accurately coalescing. As clusters, they are breath-takingly beautiful - the image below of NGC-1783 (a sub-section of the Large Magellanic Cloud) can only convey an inferior idea of their true majesty. The LMC spawned the largest supernova of recent times.

I've just imported that image as the 'wallpaper' on my laptop. The bigger it is the more amazing it looks. (Feel free to snag it.)

As a poem to accompany this brief space blog (I know, it seems to have been a recurrent theme of late), I offer you Radio Big Bang It's still a work-in-progress but I'm quite taken with the idea. Anyway, I hope you like it...

Radio Big Bang
Don't mess with that dial, star-child.
You've locked on to Radio Big Bang
pulsing on the back-beat of the universe.

DJ Sky High (aka the Detonator)
is coming at you through the ether
from Deepest Space
to grace your speculating hours,
letting you know you are not alone.

Tuned-in girls and boys
in the galaxy next door
are shaking their pods
and bouncing the floor
in time to the station's roaring beat,

so stay on this frequency and groove
with some fundamental moves.
Throw your shapes, embrace the wave
and enjoy the elation
of being at one with creation,
not just raving, resounding.


We are stardust. Thanks for reading, S ;-)