classification

"Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life." -Marcel Proust Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue! Messier was not the first person to try and make an accurate, large catalog of deep sky objects, but he was the first to successfully do so: most of his objects both actually exist, are deep sky objects, and had their positions recorded correctly. Image credit: © 2008 Space-and-Telescope.com. Most, that is, but not all. Today, we'll be looking at the open star cluster Messier 48…
"The ruins were just a reminder that what had been was no longer. That everything we are will be gone someday. That I will be forgotten." -Megan Miranda Some four-and-a-half billion years ago, a ultra-massive cloud of cold gas and dust collapsed, giving rise to thousands of stars of all different types, from hot, massive, quick-burning blue stars down to low-mass, cool red dwarfs. And within a few hundred million years, that open star cluster dissociated, flinging the individual stars that once made it up throughout the galaxy. The lone remnant of that cluster known to us lights up our…
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…
Lasius (Acanthomyops) arizonicus with mealybug, Huachuca Mountains, Arizona. Students of the North American myrmecofauna will undoubtedly recognize this ant.  Pudgy, pleasingly orange in color, and smelling sweetly of citrus, the Citronella ant is an endearing creature.   This Nearctic endemic is among our most common ants, living in underground empires farming root aphids and mealybugs for sustenance. Yet few people ever encounter these shy insects.  They emerge above ground for only a few hours each year, in late summer to see off the colony's winged reproductives. The dozen or so…
From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. Isn't that a good sentence? It's the first of this chapter. There's music in the way the Biblical ring of "From the first dawn of life", falls towards the swallowed repetition of "groups under groups", which itself mirrors and explains the descending degrees of resemblance that gives the sentence its scientific filling. The next line is just as good: "This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of the stars in…