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On this day in 1935 – October 3rd – Apollo 16 astronaut Charles "Charlie" Duke was born in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Duke was the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 16 and the tenth and youngest person to walk upon the surface of the Moon.
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Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

Suzy Kassem

Suzy Kassem is an American writer of Egyptian parentage whose insightful work often reflects themes of self-discovery and empowerment. In this quote, she underlines the destructive power of self-doubt and points out that the fear of failing can be more paralyzing than any actual setback. Often, it is our own hesitation that stifles our potential; it’s so easy to talk ourselves out of something scary or new with an unknown outcome. Kassem reminds us that although failure is difficult, it can also impart important lessons and growth — certainly more than we get out of never trying at all.

“God is with us.” (Zechariah 8:23)

If we go for the easy way, we never change.

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović is a Yugoslav-born performance artist whose work relies heavily on her own physicality and interactions with spectators. Abramović began painting as a child, but later found herself drawn to the challenges of performance art. Her best-known work includes “The Lovers” (1988), in which she and her romantic partner Ulay, a fellow artist, ended their relationship by walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China; and “The Artist Is Present” (2010), where she sat across a table from spectators for seven hours a day (for the piece’s three-month run) without any touching or speaking. Abramović’s art offers a channel for personal transformation, and her words here remind us not to play it safe. Change is natural, and can help us grow and flourish into our best selves.

DAILY PSALM “The Lord will build up Zion again, and appear in all his glory.” (Psalm 102:17) READ

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On this day in 1958 – October 1st – NASA was founded.
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French astronomer Odette Bancilhon was born on 22 September 1908. She had a science degree and served as a meteorological assistant in Algiers for a year beginning in 1932. She was later appointed to replace Alfred Schmitt while he did his military service. During this time she discovered 1333 Cevenola, a main belt asteroid.

In 1937 she was appointed as an assistant in the observatory. She married Alfred Schmitt in 1942, and in 1950 they were transferred to the Strasbourg Observatory in France. In 1956 they went to the Quito Observatory in Ecuador, Odette working there as an assistant and Alfred as observatory director. Odette retired in 1964.

Odette has a distinction given to few people, a main-belt asteroid named in her honor. In 1951 a former colleague at the Algiers Observatory, Louis Boyer, named his discovery 1713 Bancilhon in her honor.
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On this day in 1897 – October 1st – the 40-inch refracting telescope was dedicated at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, USA.

From 1897-1909 it was the world's largest telescope. It's still the world's largest refracting telescope, and is commonly known as the Yerkes "Great Refractor".
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On this day in 1845 – October 1st – English astronomer William Henry Mahoney Christie was born in Woolwich, London.

He served as Chief Assistant to George Biddell Airy at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich from 1870 to 1881, replacing Airy in 1881 to become the eighth Astronomer Royal of England. He remained in office until his retirement from the post in 1910.
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On this day in 1891 – September 30th – Soviet scientist, mathematician, astronomer and geophysicist Otto Yulyevich Schmidt was born in Mogilev, Russian Empire (now Belarus).

A graduate of Kiev University in 1913, Schmidt was to become professor of geophysics at the Institute of Earth Physics in Moscow where he specialized in the study of lunar surface.
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On this day in 2016 – September 30th – ESA's Rosetta mission ended with a controlled descent to the surface of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
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On this day in 1880 – September 30th – Henry Draper took the first photograph of a nebula, the Orion Nebula.

Draper was an American physician, professor of medicine, keen astronomer and pioneer of astrophotography. Stars with HD numbers are listed in the Henry Draper Catalog compiled by Harvard College Observatory and funded by Draper's widow, Anna Draper.
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“The Lord will guard us as a shepherd guards his flock.” (Jeremiah 31:10)

LOL, technology is great.

Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams was a true titan of 20th-century American drama. At the height of his success, from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, he wrote a number of critically acclaimed and enduring plays, including “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” His plays were often brutally honest, with characters and themes taken straight from his own life. He explored many weighty aspects of the human experience, including addiction, mental illness, sexuality, loneliness, aging, and death. But Williams was hugely sympathetic to the flawed yet complex characters he created. Upon the playwright’s death in 1983, “The New York Times” perfectly captured his nature in its obituary, calling Williams “a poet of the human heart.”

Denmark has selected the historical drama "The Promised Land", starring Mads Mikkelsen, as its official Oscar entry for Best International Feature. The film has been making the rounds on the festival circuit. It will be released in US theaters on February 2nd, 2024. The trailer is online with English subtitles.

"The Promised Land" is directed by Nikolaj Arcel, who worked with Mikkelsen on the 2012 film "A Royal Affair". Also based on real events, you can read my review on the Drama Movies site. A Royal Affair Film Review

When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise—in God I trust and am not afraid.


—Psalm 56:3-4 NIV

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Some while after putting this article up, Bellaonline's processing apparatus has introduced some punctuation errors. So far it has refused to let me correct them.

So please note that:
1. The Danish astronomer who first determined the speed of light was Ole Rømer, not Ole Rømer'.
2. The TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) project is located at the University of Liège [not Liège] in Belgium.
3. In the heading that that has mysteriously come to say Asteroid 2012 DA14 ¬â€œ a miss, the ¬â€œ simply began life as a dash (-)
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On this day in 1765 – September 29th – German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding was born in Lauenburg.

He is best remembered for discovering the third asteroid, Juno. He found it on 1 Sep 1804 while working at the private observatory of his countryman and fellow astronomer, Johann Hieronymus Schröter..

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On this day in 1605 – September 28th – French astronomer and mathematician Ismaël Bullialdus was born in Loudon.

Often regarded as ‘the most noted astronomer of his generation’ he wrote several books, the most famous being Astronomia Philolaica, in which he supported Johannes Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits. Bullialdus was also a defender of the views and ideas of Copernicus and Galileo.
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On this day in 2007 – September 27th – NASA's Dawn spacecraft was launched.

Dawn orbited and studied the asteroid Vesta, and then went on to study dwarf planet Ceres. The mission has ended, but the spacecraft remains in orbit around Ceres..

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On this day in 1814 – September 27th – American astronomer Daniel Kirkwood was born in Harford County, Maryland.

Kirkwood is best known for his study of asteroid orbits. When arranging the then-growing number of discovered asteroids by their distance from the Sun, he noted several gaps, now named Kirkwood gaps. He associated these gaps with orbital resonances with the orbit of Jupiter..
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On this day in 1634 – September 25th – Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Rømer was born in Aarhus.

He is best known for making the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light by precisely measuring the length of time between eclipses of Jupiter by one of its moons..
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Russian Astronomer Pelageya Fedorovna Shajn, née Sannikova, was born September 22, 1894 to a peasant family in the village Ostanin located in the Solikamsky District of the Perm Governorate on the European slopes of the Ural mountains.

I wasn't able to find out what her young life was like or how she became educated in science and able to get a job at the Simeiz Observatory on the Crimean peninsula. But in 1928 she became the first woman ever to discover a minor planet – the asteroid 1112 Polonia. She went on to discover 19 minor planets and 140 variable stars, and was the co-discoverer of comet 61P/Shajn-Schaldach.

Pelageya married her colleague at the observatory, Grigory Shajn, who was a prominent Soviet scientist. After WWII he become the director of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory. One of the minor planets discovered by Pelageya was named 1648 Shajna in honor of her and her husband.
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“The Lord remembers his covenant for ever.” (Psalm 105:8)