Astronomy Picture of the Day - M83: The Southern Pinwheel

Explanation: Beautiful and bright spiral galaxy M83 lies some twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, the Southern Pinwheel. Still, reddish star forming regions that dot this cosmic pinwheel's spiral arms have suggested another nickname, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. A mere 40,000 light-years across, smaller than the Milky Way, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp, groundbased telescopic view also features foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies.

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For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.

Please note: I will not be able to post the APOD on Saturday, 12 Aug, 2026 due to unavoidable travel

Pinging the APOD list

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Please note: I will not be able to post the APOD on Saturday, 12 Aug, 2026 due to unavoidable travel. I will post late Saturday or likely early Sunday

The humor that surrounds the character of Arnold comes from his human-like abilities and lifestyle, and from the way the people of Hooterville insist on thinking of him as a fellow human. They invite him to town meetings, they play checkers with him (and lose), and they speak English to him and can understand him when he speaks with pig squeals and grunts. New resident Oliver Douglas is the lone holdout. He tries to explain to people that Arnold is just a pig, but no one will listen to him. On the contrary, they are suspicious of Oliver, because of his inability to communicate with Arnold. This dynamic is part of a larger theme of Green Acres, that Oliver’s sense of logic is meaningless in the Hooterville universe.

Arnold can do pretty much anything a human can. He can write his name and change channels on the television. He watches the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite to keep up with the issues. He signs checks and can adjust the TV antenna, and he is the smartest student at the local grade school. He carries his lunchbox in his mouth, and often plays practical jokes on the other students. Arnold is also artistically talented: he is working on a novel, he plays the piano, and he is an accomplished abstract painter, dubbed “Porky Picasso”, whose piece titled “Nude at a Filling Station” wins first prize out of two thousand entries in a student art contest. He even works as a “paper pig” delivering newspapers, although he has a bad habit of throwing copies so hard and so badly aimed that he sometimes breaks windows.

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