Over the weekend, the Treasury/Federal Reserve/FDIC stepped in to guarantee the deposits at the failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and did the same for Signature Bank in New York, a more crypto-focused bank which was also put into FDIC receivership. Declaring a systemic risk to the banking system, the Treasury/Fed/FDIC…

The Veil nebula is the wispy remnant of a supernova that exploded somewhere between 10 and 20 thousand years ago. It consists of true brighter portions, the Eastern and Western Veil.

Mark Twain was reputed to have said that history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. And when you review the course of American history, you can certainly see the same battles being fought over and over again, each time on slightly different terrain. In the abstract, these constant…

This week’s photos in order: NGC 6781, an almost perfectly spherical planetary nebula; Barnard 143, a dark nebula that, together with Barnard 142, makes up Barnard’s “E”; NGC 6822 (that fuzzy patch being bisected by a satellite trail), an irregular galaxy that is the closest non-satellite galaxy to our Milky…

The Republican party’s descent into proto-fascism is best understood as the end result of the failure of the conservative project as a whole. Conservatives today openly admit that the policies of Goldwater/Reagan conservatism have been an abject failure that have been rejected by the majority of Americans. Its libertarian, laissez-faire…

Two classic planetary nebulae today — Messier 57, the Ring Nebula, with its central star visible, and Messier 27, the Dumbbell Nebula.