New Year is a time for celebration,

of love, of life, of Friendship,

Therefore, it is the time to thank God,

for the wonderful friends,

and to bring to their lives,

as much magic as they bring to ours,

Have a happy and a memorable holiday!"

Happy New Year 2017 

 

"New Year is a time for celebration,
of love, of life, of Friendship,
Therefore, it is the time to thank God,
for the wonderful friends,
and to bring to their lives,
as much magic as they bring to ours,
Have a happy and a memorable holiday!"
Happy New Year 2017 - See more at: http://www.newyear.quotesms.com/#sthash.mMQVW2ZE.dpuf

Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity

 "No one in her time could resist Emma Hamilton, and nor will you​"

 The Guardian

Emma Hamilton was one of the most famous international celebrities of her time and her life is the ultimate costume drama. Now largely remembered as the woman who captured the heart of the nation’s hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Emma was an extraordinary woman in her own right.

From maid to muse, pauper to politician

Emy Lyon (as she was christened) was born into poverty in 1765 in a poor mining village in Cheshire. Her father was a blacksmith.
At the age of 12 or 13, Amy (as she sometimes called herself) travelled to London where she found employment as a servant working alongside the future actress, Jane Powell.
Perhaps inspired by Jane, within a year Amy was working in the bohemian heart of London, Covent Garden, in the house of Thomas Linley. Linley was a key player in the theatre and Amy no doubt set her hopes on finding an inroad into the world of theatre that had helped many before her escape the drudgery of servitude.

Sadly, the job was not to last and it is around this time that she may have been forced by her dire circumstances into a world of sexual exploitation. Not much is known about this time in her life but at the age of 15 an encounter would change her story forever – she was discovered by playboy Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh.
Fetherstonhaugh was taken by Amy’s staggering beauty and took her for his mistress. She entertained guests at his country house, and it was here that Amy met Charles Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick.

When Amy fell pregnant by Fetherstonhaugh, he abandoned her. Greville then offered Emma ‘protection’ as his mistress  on condition that she change her name and cut ties with many of those close to her, including her newborn daughter.
Amy Lyon would now be Emma Hart and her only link to her past was her mother. Life with Greville gave Emma the opportunity – which she seized – to cultivate a more sophisticated and respectable identity.

Still just 16, she was introduced by Greville to the painter George Romney and due to her theatrical flair and beauty became his greatest inspiration. He would begin more than 60 paintings of her in the years that followed, and these images made her famous

Emma was becoming one of the most painted women of her time. She remained devoted to Greville but he, however, wanted to marry a rich heiress and his beautiful young mistress had become an obstacle to this ambition. Thinking it no more than a holiday, Emma and her mother were sent to Naples to stay with the recently widowed Sir William Hamilton.
After some weeks in Naples without news from Greville, Emma was devastated when she eventually learned that he had no intention of joining her and instead wanted her to be mistress to the much older Hamilton.
As distressed as she would have been at this revelation, in time she found ways to turn this predicament and her new surroundings to her advantage. Once again, circumstances and her own determination would take her story in a new direction.
[ http://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/emma-hamilton#SQyGZMVI1LvI9bpy.99]

Royal Observatory, Greenwich

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich  is an observatory situated on a hill in Greenwich Park, overlooking the River Thames. It played a major role in the history of astronomy and navigation, and is best known as the location of the prime meridian.

The observatory was commissioned in 1675 by King Charles II, with the foundation stone being laid on 10 August. The site was chosen by Sir Christopher Wren. At that time the king also created the position of Astronomer Royal, to serve as the director of the observatory and to "apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation." He appointed John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal. The building was completed in the summer of 1676. The building was often called "Flamsteed House", in reference to its first occupant.

The scientific work of the observatory was relocated elsewhere in stages in the first half of the 20th century, and the Greenwich site is now maintained as a museum.

By 1700, skilled seamen could find their position north or south (their latitude), but still lacked accurate instruments or methods to calculate their east-west position, known as longitude.

With growing international trade, the lives and valuable cargoes lost in shipwrecks made solving this problem of longitude urgent for all sea-going nations.

John Harrison's H4 is the most important timekeeper ever made. It is the machine that helped solve the problem of keeping accurate time at sea and finally won Harrison huge rewards from the Board of Longitude and the British Government. H4's high-energy watch balance was less affected by the movement of a ship and was the design breakthrough that Harrison needed. He believed his fourth timekeeper was the most perfect and beautiful machine ever constructed. H4's predecessors H1, H2 and H3 are all also on display in Time and Longitude.

Peter Harrison Planetarium

‘Gorgeous galaxies and stunning stars’

The Guardian

The 15 million Peter Harrison Planetarium opened in 2007, a beautiful cone-shaped addition to the Royal Observatory designed by architects Allies and Morrison. This 120-seat, state-of-the-art facility replaced the small and out of date planetarium in the dome of the South Building and is now the only place to see the stars in London. The bronze cone is precisely tilted at 51.5 degrees (the latitude of Greenwich) so that it points to the North Star, while the reflexive disc at right angles to this is then aligned with the celestial equator and the vertical north edge marks the zenith. If you're not sure what all this technical and astronomical planning means just take a look and you'll get a great view of the stars. 

Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year is the biggest international competition of its kind, annually showcasing spectacular images shot by astrophotographers worldwide.

This year's awesome winning photographs in our free exhibition at the Royal Observatory.

A hundred thousand million Stars make one Galaxy;
A hundred thousand million Galaxies make one Universe.
The figures may not be very trustworthy, but I think they give a correct impression.

— Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

The Expanding Universe (1933), 4.

If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.

— George Gamow

The Creation of the Universe (1952), 31.

There is a point of view among astronomical researchers that is generally referred to as the Principle of Mediocrity. ... If the Sun and its retinue of worlds is only one system among many, then many other systems will be like ours: home to life. Indeed, to the extent that this is true, we should be prepared for the possibility that, even in the Milky Way galaxy, billions of planets may be carpeted by the dirty, nasty business known as life.

— Seth Shostak

Quoted in 'Do Aliens Exist in the Milky Way', PBS web page for WGBH Nova, 'Origins.'

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

— Carl Sagan

Cosmos (1985), 160.

Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us an uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy—since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which, under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing the distance of the invisible background so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all.

— Edgar Allan Poe

'Eureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe' (1848). Collected in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1857), Vol. 2, 183

Changes, cyclic or otherwise, within the solar system or within our galaxy, would seem to be the easy and incontrovertible solution for everything that I have found remarkable in the stratigraphical record.

— Derek Ager

In The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record (1973), 83.