Venus, brightest of all planets, shines in evening’s pastel twilight and sets by nightfall. A young crescent moon accompanies the goddess of love and beauty tonight, October 3; delight in the pair from about 7pm until 7:30pm, depending on your view to the west-southwest horizon. Saturn and Mars catch the eye to the left of...
Watch the waxing Moon step eastward against the stars-and-planets background from evening to evening. (These scenes are drawn exact for the middle of North America. For clarity, the Moon is drawn three times its actual apparent size. The visibility of faint stars through bright twilight is exaggerated.)
Sky & Telescope diagram published with permission
52 BC – Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, surrenders to the Romans under Julius Caesar, ending the siege and Battle of Alesia. 1283 – Dafydd ap Gruffydd, was Prince of Wales from December 11 1282 until his execution on October 3 1283 by King Edward I of England. He was the last independent ruler of Wales. On 30 September, Dafydd ap Gruffudd,...
Edgar Allan Poe
"Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man"
The China Institute (40 Rector Street, between West and Washington Streets) is hosting a landmark exhibition, “Art in a Time of Chaos: Masterworks From Six Dynasties China, Third through Sixth Centuries.” This period, China’s equivalent to Europe’s Renaissance, ushered in an explosion of artistic creativity and the celebration of individual expression. And recent archaeological digs have...
Head of a Bodhisattva
Northern Qi dynasty (550-577) Sandstone ~ Unearthed in 1954 Collection of the Shanxi Museum
To Matthew Fenton, Very nice article (“Unaccompanied Minors”) on a cappella singing, and singing in general. I like the inclusion of a discussion of the evolutionary origins of singing. Darwin’s reference to the “principle of the inherited effects of use” is interesting. It shows that the usual pedagogical practice of placing “Darwinian” (evolution by natural...
The free Dockapella music festival in Wagner Park on Saturday, October 1 featured voices that fly without instruments from Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and Brown and Vassar College, as well as ensembles from New York University and the University of Virginia.
Horace Greeley has greeted hundreds of millions of New Yorkers and out-of-towners alike over the past hundred years with a nod of his head as they scoot past his curious perch in City Hall Park. You can find him along the path between City Hall and the Tweed Courthouse sitting in the grass and taking...
On June 19, 1916, Horace Greeley finally heeded his own advice and went west. Ousted from his niche in the Tribune Building by a city ordinance, public outcry kept the Tribune's founder from moving to Central Park and appropriately kept him in sight of Printing House Square. In this photo, Greeley appears to be supervising his own move to City Hall Park.
