"And you know they will swing, swing their swords for show"

"The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth ~ the atoms that make up the human body ~ are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures... these stars ~ the high mass ones among them ~ went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy, guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, and form the next generation of solar systems: stars with orbiting planets.

And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So when I look up at the night sky ~ and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe ~ but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up. Many people feel small, because they're small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars."

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson


"You are both stars, don't forget. And the stars exploded billions of years ago, to form everything that is this world. Everything we know, is stardust. So don't forget,
you are stardust!"

~ Gypsy, from "Before Sunrise"

'Tis ever a dark day indeed when a beloved video is rudely nixed from The Audio-Visual Annals of Modern Civilization (aka YouTube) for whatever reason: offensiveness, profanity, evidence compromission, abject shame, or in this case, enforcement of copyright infringement.

Montréal's Wolf Parade, for years signed solely to Seattle's SubPop and allowing widespread dissemination of their brilliant work online, found themselves enmired in a distribution deal of sorts with mega-giant Warner; almost immediately, all clips featuring their music were effectively yanked off free ether. The following video, originally discovered over three years ago, was one of the saddest losses as it is one of my favourite fan-made clips of all time, making breathtaking use of a celestial photography project I dearly adore. Desperately searching for a reposting of it over the years had proven unfruitful... until today.

It's back!

The joy! The exultation! The rapture.

To whomever created this work of glory: May I kiss you, please? How could you know? Is it really possible to become dry-mouthed and nauseous with desire just from looking at pictures of space while listening to heart-racing music, or is there something truly wrong with me?

And of course, go balls to the wall FS/TSS™ (Full-Screen/Turned-up Speaker Status) with this one. Seriously. Then lean back and enjoy.









If your astronomical cojones don't feel rubbed and loved up well enough with this video and NASA link above, check out this phenomenal list of astronomy apps recently posted by my favourite living astrophysicist and fantasy friend, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You'll have the entire known cosmos at the ready touch of your fingers wherever you go... providing you have a smartphone, that is.


(photo credit: Called the "Dumbbell Nebula," the above photo comes from the December 27th entry for a sublime on-line project, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. When expanded, it almost looks like a red blood cell being blasted with a shot of Sauron badness. Or an unrolled condom with a light-needle poking through it like an ab-wheel.)