St. John's College Observatory and Planetarium

Winter Solstice will occur in December 21st at 0430 EST. Welcome to the Season of Light ;

The Owl Cluster / C13

Celestron NexStar 6SE with Hyperstar
300mm @ F1.9
Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i
Altair Hypercam 183M

Acquisition Details:
5" Subs
L: 5" x 120
R: 5" x 60
G: 5" x 60
B: 5" x 60

Location:
Bortle 8/9 in Houston, Texas

Processing:
Stacked in DSS
Processed in Photoshop

4 January 1925 | French Jew Jean Salomon Mosse was born in Paris.

On 20 November 1943 he was deported from to in a transport of 1,200 Jews. He arrived at the camp on 23 November 1943.
No. 164584
He did not survive.

Solar Eclipse Over the South Pacific Ocean.

3 January 1916 | Jewish woman Hena Weissberg (nee Szlajn) was born in Warsaw. During the war she lived in Paris.

On 2 September 1943 she was deported from to in a transport of 1,000 Jews. She reached the camp on 4 September. She did not survive.

Frustrated with the racist harassment, culminating with her learning that the studio was withholding her fan mail, Nichelle Nichols submitted her resignation from the "Star Trek" television series after consulting with series creator Gene Roddenberry. She stated in several interviews that the harassment made her go back to work in theater until attending an NAACP fundraiser. The fundraiser was where a Star Trek fan was about to meet her for the first time and, to her astonishment, the fan turned out to be Dr. Martin Luther King. King stated that his wife and children had seen "Star Trek" on TV and it was the only television series that he had approved of. He said that her role as the fourth in command of the USS Enterprise became a positive role model for African-Americans. She withdrew her resignation from the series when King personally convinced her that her role was too important as a breakthrough to leave.

From the late 1970s until 1987, Nichols was employed by NASA and in charge of astronaut recruits and hopefuls. Most of the recruits she launched were minority candidates of different races and/or ethnicities, as well as gender, like Guion Bluford (the first African-American male astronaut to go into space), Sally Ride (the first American female astronaut), Judith A. Resnik (one of the original female astronauts recruited by NASA, who perished during the launch of the Challenger on January 28, 1986), and Ron McNair (another victim of the Challenger disaster).

"'Star Trek' represented, and still does represent, the future we can have, a future that is beyond the petty squabbles we are dealing with here on Earth, now as much as ever, and we are able to devote ourselves to the betterment of all human kind by doing what we do so well: explore. This kind of a future isn't impossible - and we need to all rethink our priorities to really bring that vision to life." (IMDb)

Happy Birthday, Nichelle Nichols!

🇵🇱 🇩🇰
There’s a graveyard in Europe for one hundred and five men and the Lone woman.

➡️ That’s her name, not situation.

➡️ Anna Louise Christine Mogensen was called Lone, a short for Danish Abelone or Polish Apolonia. She was a Dane and Pole at the same time, having been born in Poland, killed in Denmark, and married to a Pole. In love with all three, she lost her life twenty-three years into that life, and her marriage three days into that marriage.

➡️ Lone, born in 1921, spends her first fifteen happy, blissful years in Jaroszowiec north of Cracow, where her father runs a cement plant. In mid-1930s, the business gets killed by the Great Depression aftershocks, the family returns home, and the girl is homesick there. Poland is her number one, Denmark next in line.

➡️ In Denmark, Lone feels like a transplant at first. She goes to a boarding school to polish her Danish, joins the Girl Scouts and takes up photography. She is almost eighteen in 1939, when Poland, alone and enveloped by Germany and the Soviets, gets invaded. The country comes under occupation, and it’s a hard one, in all kinds of ways.

➡️ Poland is number one and Denmark next in line also on Hitler’s target list – which is a long list, by the way. Some six months into the war, the Wehrmacht goes up the Jutland Peninsula and grabs the country, which comes under occupation. However, compared to Poland, it’s more like a protectorate, at least until August 1943.

➡️ It IS occupation to Lone. She gets very occupied after Germany invades both her countries, and goes to work for a tough resistance group Holger Danske to collect intelligence, take snapshots of German military installations, and carry reports and orders. In the autumn of 1943, she even helps evacuate Danish Jews to Sweden.

➡️ At the same time, the Polish Intelligence is busy in Denmark. It’s not so much pre-war spooks from Department II of the CINC Staff as the Continental Action, organized and run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and called by the SOE the Civilian Polish Underground Service. Its Danish branch goes by "Felicja," or "Inflexion."

➡️ Most of its activities overlap with what the local resistance does, and Lone helps, especially after she meets 2nd Lt. Lucjan Masłocha, who’s just broken out of a POW camp near Lübeck. Instant two-way crush. Following a short-training by Polish spooks based in Sweden, Lucjan takes over "Felicja", and they begin to work together.

➡️ They infiltrate the German police apparatus, report to the Allies all enemy activity after the protectorate got upgraded to occupation, map out airfields, radar sites and critical infrastructure, work out courier routes, collect weapons, all the while cooperating with the Danish underground. Somewhere along the way, he pops the question.

➡️ And she says yes, of course. He’s bound to report to the London HQ, so they don’t wait with the wedding and get married late on 31 December 1944. 2 January, Lucjan leaves, but soon returns: he failed to board the ship, too many Germans. Lone’s over the moon, but it’s the third day of her marriage, and twenty-third year of her life.

➡️ That night, heavily armed and trigger-happy Gestapo and Hipo, local auxiliary police, storm into their Copenhagen flat. They open up with everything they have and Lone, hit several times, is killed on the spot. Lucjan will take eight more days to die in a Wehrmacht hospital. Four months later, the Germans are gone and the country’s free.

➡️ Denmark has a special place for people who died to make it free. It’s the Ryvangen ex*****on site, turned into a memorial park and graveyard for one hundred and five heroes and lone heroine, Anna Mogensen. For one hundred and five Danes and lone Pole, Lucjan Masłocha. Still, neither Lone nor Lucjan is really alone there.

➡️ Lone has her man among all these men, and Lucjan his half-Polish wife among all these Danes.