no peace without justice

Ending Blowback Terrorism

JEFFREY D. SACHS

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. His books include The End of Poverty, Co… 

Painful as it is to admit, the West, especially the United States, bears significant responsibility for creating the conditions in which ISIS has flourished. Only a change in US and European foreign policy vis-à-vis the Middle East can reduce the risk of further terrorism.The recent attacks should be understood as "blowback terrorism": a dreadful unintended result of repeated US and European covert and overt military actions throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia that aimed to overthrow governments and install regimes compliant with Western interests. These operations have not only destabilized the targeted regions, causing great suffering; they have also put populations in the US, the European Union, Russia, and the Middle East at significant risk of terror.The public has never really been told the true history of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, or the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Starting in 1979, the CIA mobilized, recruited, trained, and armed Sunni young men to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA recruited widely from Muslim populations (including in Europe) to form the Mujahideen, a multinational Sunni fighting force mobilized to oust the Soviet infidel from Afghanistan.Bin Laden, from a wealthy Saudi family, was brought in to help lead and co-finance the operation. This was typical of CIA operations: relying on improvised funding through a wealthy Saudi family and proceeds from local smuggling and the narcotics trade.By promoting the core vision of a jihad to defend the lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) from outsiders, the CIA produced a hardened fighting force of thousands of young men displaced from their homes and stoked for battle. It is this initial fighting force – and the ideology that motivated it – that today still forms the basis of the Sunni jihadist insurgencies, including ISIS. While the jihadists' original target was the Soviet Union, today the "infidel" includes the US, Europe (notably France and the United Kingdom), and Russia.At the end of the 1980s, with the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, some elements of the Mujahideen morphed into Al Qaeda, Arabic for "the base," which referred to the military facilities and training grounds in Afghanistan built for the Mujahideen by bin Laden and the CIA. After the Soviet withdrawal, the term Al Qaeda shifted meaning from the specific military base to the organizational base of jihadist activities.Blowback against the US began in 1990 with the first Gulf War, when the US created and expanded its military bases in the Dar al-Islam, most notably in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam's founding and holiest sites. This expanded US military presence was anathema to the core jihadist ideology that the CIA had done so much to foster.America's unprovoked war on Iraq in 2003 unleashed the demons. Not only was the war itself launched on the basis of CIA lies; it also aimed to create a Shia-led regime subservient to the US and anathema to the Sunni jihadists and the many more Sunni Iraqis who were ready to take up arms. More recently, the US, France, and the UK toppled Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, and the US worked with the Egyptian generals who ousted the elected Muslim Brotherhood government. In Syria, following President Bashar al-Assad's violent suppression of peaceful public protests in 2011, the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other regional allies helped to foment a military insurgency that has pushed the country into a downward spiral of chaos and violence.Such operations have failed – repeatedly and frequently disastrously – to produce legitimate governments or even rudimentary stability. On the contrary, by upending established, albeit authoritarian, governments in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and destabilizing Sudan and other parts of Africa deemed hostile to the West, they have done much to fuel chaos, bloodshed, and civil war. It is this turmoil that has enabled ISIS to capture and defend territory in Syria, Iraq, and parts of North Africa.
Three steps are needed to defeat ISIS and other violent jihadists. First, US President Barack Obama should pull the plug on CIA covert operations. The use of the CIA as a secret army of destabilization has a long, tragic history of failure, all hidden from public view under the agency's cloak of secrecy. Ending CIA-caused mayhem would go far to staunch the instability, violence, and anti-Western hatred that fuels today's terrorism.
Second, the US, Russia, and the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council should immediately stop their infighting and establish a framework for Syrian peace. They have a shared and urgent stake in confronting ISIS; all are victims of the terror. Moreover, military action against ISIS can succeed only with the legitimacy and backing of the UN Security Council.The UN framework should include an immediate end to the insurgency against Assad that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have pursued; a Syrian cease-fire; a UN-mandated military force to confront ISIS; and a political transition in Syria dictated not by the US, but by a UN consensus to support a non-violent political reconstruction.
Finally, the long-term solution to regional instability lies in sustainable development. The entire Middle East is beset not only by wars but also by deepening development failures: intensifying fresh water stress, desertification, high youth unemployment, poor educational systems, and other serious blockages.
More wars – especially CIA-backed, Western-led wars – will solve nothing. By contrast, a surge of investment in education, health, renewable energy, agriculture, and infrastructure, financed both from within the region and globally, is the real key to building a more stable future for the Middle East and the world.

Gandhi’s Top 10 tips for Changing the World

by Henrik Edbert

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems."

1. Change yourself.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”If you change yourself you will change your world. If you change how you think then you will change how you feel and what actions you take. And so the world around you will change. Not only because you are now viewing your environment through new lenses of thoughts and emotions but also because the change within can allow you to take action in ways you wouldn’t have – or maybe even have thought about – while stuck in your old thought patterns.And the problem with changing your outer world without changing yourself is that you will still be you when you reach that change you have strived for. You will still have your flaws, anger, negativity, self-sabotaging tendencies etc. intact.And so in this new situation you will still not find what you hoped for since your mind is still seeping with that negative stuff. And if you get more without having some insight into and distance from your ego it may grow more powerful. Since your ego loves to divide things, to find enemies and to create separation it may start to try to create even more problems and conflicts in your life and world.

2. You are in control.“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”What you feel and how you react to something is always up to you. There may be a “normal” or a common way to react to different things. But that’s mostly just all it is.You can choose your own thoughts, reactions and emotions to pretty much everything. You don’t have to freak out, overreact of even react in a negative way. Perhaps not every time or instantly. Sometimes a knee-jerk reaction just goes off. Or an old thought habit kicks in.And as you realize that no-one outside of yourself can actually control how you feel you can start to incorporate this thinking into your daily life and develop it as a thought habit. A habit that you can grow stronger and stronger over time. Doing this makes life a whole lot easier and more pleasurable.

3. Forgive and let it go.“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”“An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”Fighting evil with evil won’t help anyone. And as said in the previous tip, you always choose how to react to something. When you can incorporate such a thought habit more and more into your life then you can react in a way that is more useful to you and others.You realize that forgiving and letting go of the past will do you and the people in your world a great service. And spending your time in some negative memory won’t help you after you have learned the lessons you can learn from that experience. You’ll probably just cause yourself more suffering and paralyze yourself from taking action in this present moment.If you don’t forgive then you let the past and another person to control how you feel. By forgiving you release yourself from those bonds. And then you can focus totally on, for instance, the next point.

4. Without action you aren’t going anywhere.“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”Without taking action very little will be done. However, taking action can be hard and difficult. There can be much inner resistance.And so you may resort to preaching, as Gandhi says. Or reading and studying endlessly. And feeling like you are moving forward. But getting little or no practical results in real life.So, to really get where you want to go and to really understand yourself and your world you need to practice. Books can mostly just bring you knowledge. You have to take action and translate that knowledge into results and understanding.

5. Take care of this moment.“I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”The best way that I have found to overcome the inner resistance that often stops us from taking action is to stay in the present as much as possible and to be accepting.Why? Well, when you are in the present moment you don’t worry about the next moment that you can’t control anyway. And the resistance to action that comes from you imagining negative future consequences – or reflecting on past failures – of your actions loses its power. And so it becomes easier to both take action and to keep your focus on this moment and perform better.Have a look at 8 Ways to Return to the Present Moment for tips on how quickly step into the now. And remember that reconnecting with and staying in the now is a mental habit – a sort of muscle – that you grow. Over time it becomes more powerful and makes it easier to slip into the present moment.

6. Everyone is human.“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.”When you start to make myths out of people – even though they may have produced extraordinary results – you run the risk of becoming disconnected from them. You can start to feel like you could never achieve similar things that they did because they are so very different. So it’s important to keep in mind that everyone is just a human being no matter who they are.And I think it’s important to remember that we are all human and prone to make mistakes. Holding people to unreasonable standards will only create more unnecessary conflicts in your world and negativity within you.It’s also important to remember this to avoid falling into the pretty useless habit of beating yourself up over mistakes that you have made. And instead be able to see with clarity where you went wrong and what you can learn from your mistake. And then try again.

7. Persist.“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”Be persistent. In time the opposition around you will fade and fall away. And your inner resistance and self-sabotaging tendencies that want to hold you back and keep you like you have always been will grow weaker.Find what you really like to do. Then you’ll find the inner motivation to keep going, going and going. You can also find a lot of useful tips on how keep your motivation up in How to Get Out of a Motivational Slump and 25 Simple Ways to Motivate Yourself.One reason Gandhi was so successful with his method of non-violence was because he and his followers were so persistent. They just didn’t give up.Success or victory will seldom come as quickly as you would have liked it to. I think one of the reasons people don’t get what they want is simply because they give up too soon. The time they think an achievement will require isn’t the same amount of time it usually takes to achieve that goal. This faulty belief partly comes from the world we live in. A world full of magic pill solutions where advertising continually promises us that we can lose a lot of weight or earn a ton of money in just 30 days. You can read more about this in One Big Mistake a Whole Lot of People Make.Finally, one useful tip to keep your persistence going is to listen to Gandhi’s third quote in this article and keep a sense of humor. It can lighten things up at the toughest of times.

8. See the good in people and help them.“I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”“Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.”“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”There is pretty much always something good in people. And things that may not be so good. But you can choose what things to focus on. And if you want improvement then focusing on the good in people is a useful choice. It also makes life easier for you as your world and relationships become more pleasant and positive.And when you see the good in people it becomes easier to motivate yourself to be of service to them. By being of service to other people, by giving them value you not only make their lives better. Over time you tend to get what you give. And the people you help may feel more inclined to help other people. And so you, together, create an upward spiral of positive change that grows and becomes stronger.By strengthening your social skills you can become a more influential person and make this upward spiral even stronger. A few articles that may provide you with useful advice in that department are Do You Make These 10 Mistakes in a Conversation? and Dale Carnegie’s Top 10 Tips for Improving Your Social Skills. Or you can just move on to the next tip.

9. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self.“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”I think that one of the best tips for improving your social skills is to behave in a congruent manner and communicate in an authentic way. People seem to really like authentic communication. And there is much inner enjoyment to be found when your thoughts, words and actions are aligned. You feel powerful and good about yourself.When words and thoughts are aligned then that shows through in your communication. Because now you have your voice tonality and body language – some say they are over 90 percent of communication – in alignment with your words.With these channels in alignment people tend to really listen to what you’re saying. You are communicating without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness.Also, if your actions aren’t in alignment with what you’re communicating then you start to hurt your own belief in what you can do. And other people’s belief in you too.

10. Continue to grow and evolve.”Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.”You can pretty much always improve your skills, habits or re-evaluate your evaluations. You can gain deeper understanding of yourself and the world.Sure, you may look inconsistent or like you don’t know what you are doing from time to time. You may have trouble to act congruently or to communicate authentically. But if you don’t then you will, as Gandhi says, drive yourself into a false position. A place where you try to uphold or cling to your old views to appear consistent while you realise within that something is wrong. It’s not a fun place to be. To choose to grow and evolve is a happier and more useful path to take.

Hubble deep field image of the universe

http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/images/large/heic1408a.jpg
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/23/hubble_galaxies_deep_image_reveals_thousands_of_weird_galaxies.html


A HUBBLE IMAGE THAT WILL DRILL INTO YOUR BRAIN

APRIL 23 2014 12:00 PM
Hubble Drills Deep Into the Universe
By Phil Plait

Phil Plait writes Slate's Bad Astronomy blog and is an astronomer, public speaker, science evangelizer, and author of Death From the Skies!  

What happens when you take a 2.4-meter telescope, launch it into space, and command it to stare at one spot in the sky for a solid 14 hours, taking data both in visible light (like our eyes see) and infrared?This. This.Give me a moment to tell you why this image will destroy your brain. Click to nicely galactinate, or click here to hugely do so.All photos by NASA/ ESAAdvertisement Can I get a "Yowza!" from the congregation? No? Maybe that's because when I shrink this Hubble Space Telescope picture down to fit the blog you can't really get a sense of what you're seeing here. So click the picture to get the 1280 x 1280 image, or better yet, do yourself and your eyeballs a favor and take a poke at the huge 3900 x 3900 pixel version, because holy wow.
!  
What you're seeing here is a view of thousands of galaxies. Thousands. Sure, there are some stars in our own Milky Way punctuating this picture here and there but they are few, and just stomped flat by the number of whole galaxies you're seeing. The stars can be distinguished from galaxies because they're point sources; small dots. They also might have those lines going through them called diffraction spikes. Galaxies don't usually get those because they're fuzzier, spread out over many pixels. That suppresses the diffraction spikes.So for example that bright point with pretty spikes you see toward the upper right is a star, probably a few thousand light years from Earth. That's a long way to be sure, but even the nearest galaxies you can see in this image are hundreds of millions of light years away! Some are billions; the most distant objects in this shot are at least 9 billion light years distant. That's a million times farther away than any star in the picture.When the light we see here left those galaxies, the Sun hadn't yet formed. When the Earth itself was coalescing from countless specks of dust, that light still had half its journey here ahead of it.So yeah. This stuff is far.CLASS B1608+656, a cluster of galaxies far, far away.In fact you're seeing galaxies at all different distances from Earth in this image, but the observation itself was taken to look at the cluster of galaxies in the center. Called CLASS B1608+656, it's a clump of galaxies about five billion light years away. The mass of that cluster acts like a lens, bending space, magnifying objects behind it. This gravitational lens has distorted and amped up the brightness of a luminous galaxy located an additional several billion light years behind it, creating the weirdly shaped mess you see in the close-up above. Rings and arcs are common in such events.But there's so much more to this image; just scanning across it reveals an incredible variety and diversity of galaxies. Remember, too, you're looking at objects as they existed eons ago; many are still growing, suffering collisions with other galaxies, giving them fantastic shapes. As an example, I'm fond of this little group near the top of the main image:A cosmic train wreck a million light years long.I'm not precisely sure what to make of this. The bigger galaxies look to all be about the same distance from us, but that could be a coincidental alignment. Some of the galaxies are blue and clumpy looking, indicating they're aggressively forming stars (hot, young, massive stars are preferentially blue), while some are quite red. The red ones may be very dusty, which reddens the light from stars, or they may be farther away, their light redshifted as it fights against the expansion of the Universe itself, losing energy along the way. It may be a mix of both. Unfortunately, this image was made using only two filters, so colors can be difficult to interpret, and don't yield a lot of subtle information. The only way to know more about the galaxies would be to measure their distance, and I didn't find anything in the literature about them.Top CommentOkay, now you've done it. My mind is completely and irrevocably blown.  More...-Tom132 CommentsJoin InThat's worth taking a moment to ponder, actually. These are entire galaxies, collections of tens of billions of stars, planets, dust, and gas clouds, each and every one a monstrous object on scales that dwarf our everyday experience … yet there are so many of each of them in this image alone we can't possibly know their details. We can determine their coordinates on the sky, get a rough estimate of their distance, but there is simply no way to get a measure of them as individuals. They are too many. It's like trying to get the life history of everyone who passes you on a busy New York City street corner. The task is too overwhelming.And just in case I have not yet crushed your puny human mind, this image represents a tiny fraction of the entire sky; perhaps only one ten-millionth of it. That means there are hundreds of billions of galaxies like these scattered throughout the Universe.So gaze again at that image, one that drills a narrow but incredibly deep view through our cosmos, one that shows us both the awe-inducing grandeur and soul-squeezing immensity of it, and remember: The Universe is far, far larger than this still.And yet here we are, pondering it. To those galaxies, we are the ones who are lost in the anonymous throng. Yet I would argue we are as important and interesting a piece of the Universe as any other we can imagine. We are part of it at the same time as we study it, and to me, that is part of what makes us great.

"The Great Mandala"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfmYF6Yboa4&sns=em

The Great Mandala (The Wheel of Life)
Peter, Paul and Mary

So I told him that he'd better shut his mouth
And do his job like a man.
And he answered "Listen, Father,I will never kill another.
"He thinks he's better than his brother that died
What the hell does he think he's doing
To his father who brought him up right?

Chorus:
Take your place on The Great Mandala
As it moves through your brief moment of time.
Win or lose now you must choose now
And if you lose you're only losing your life.
Tell the jailer not to bother
With his meal of bread and water today.
He is fasting 'til the killing's over
He's a martyr, he thinks he's a prophet.
But he's a coward, he's just playing a game
He can't do it, he can't change it
It's been going on for ten thousand years
(Chorus)
Tell the people they are safe now
Hunger stopped him, he lies still in his cell.
Death has gagged his accusations
We are free now, we can kill now,
We can hate now, now we can end the world
We're not guilty, he was crazy
And it's been going on for ten thousand years!
Take your place on The Great Mandala
As it moves through your brief moment of time.
Win or lose now you must choose now
And if you lose you've only wasted your life.

**********************
The song is about a conscientious objector who chooses to die (by starving himself)rather than kill.
The song is about a man making a morally unpopular existential choice  and giving his life for it no matter what his father or the public says.
Its one of the best anti-war songs ever written.

************
Groujo
"I can't say enough about this song. It's absolutely haunting. It tears my heart out and leaves me shaken. The phrasing and the chord progression is unique and disturbing and lovely. But it is the story that is devastating. A man of principle, a man of peace and dignity, gives up everything he has to effect change. Like so many have. He dies alone in a jail cell for his principles, without a friend, estranged from family, not appreciated or understood, an "enemy of the people". And ultimately there is no indication his sacrifice matters in the least: the killing continues unabated, he not a martyr for his cause. He was never thanked or supported and he will never know if he made the right decisions.We can feel certain the man was admirably in the right. The songwriter clearly agrees values this man's principles and courage, even if the 3 speakers in the song do not. We see him as a lonely prophet being cut down by the runaway train of cruelty and ignorance and fear that is our society. Like so many have. But he is never celebrated, never martyred. He is forgotten or reviled. An utterly purposeless tragedy.He has taken his place on the great mandala. For good or ill. The wheel of time doesn't notice. And so have the others in the song: the father, the jailer, the ruler, and the people. They take their places beside his. And the wheel rolls on, until they aren't even a memory. Is change even possible? The wheel metaphor suggest that ultimately it is not. As the second singer says, "He can't do it. He can't change it. It's been going on for 10,000 years." From this perspective, the man is misguided. He threw away his life for a hopeless cause. He's has "lost" and wasted his life. But knowing the songwriter as we do, this is not the intended message. We know he disagrees with the second singer, because he's been fighting for change his whole life. The losers are really the people who choose to rationalize their own views and refuse to accept the man's message, because they are creating exactly the dystopia they think is unavoidable. Like so many have.So we are forced to ask: what place will we ourselves take on the wheel? Consciously or not, we all choose our place on the great mandala. We have this brief moment to choose who we will be and what we will stand for. And, we are forced to confront the possibility that all our hopes and efforts will amount to nothing. I find it both excruciating and sublime that even the song refuses to reward the man for his sacrifice. Because the great mandala won't reward you either. The song ends on the disturbing thought that "if you lose you've only wasted your life." It's very ambiguous who the loser is here. And as frustrating as that is, that's exactly as it should be. You must decide for yourself."

*************
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gp4G-pQ-JI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

"collateral damage" --a euphemism for "murder"!

Americans bomb hospital in effort to retake Kunduz from the Taliban.

The Quebec City-born president of Doctors Without Borders offered up harrowing details of the attack on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, saying "patients burned alive in their beds."
"This was not just an attack on our hospital, it was an attack on the Geneva conventions," said Joanne Liu, president MSF International. "This cannot be tolerated."

"If we let this go, as if was a non-event, we are basically giving a blank check to any countries who are at war," she concluded. 
Then "war has no rules!"

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/kunduz-airstrike-doctors-without-borders-wants-unprecedented-probe-n439856

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/world/europe/kunduz-afghanistan-hospital-doctors-without-borders.html?referer=http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&rct=j&q=THE%20NATIONAL%20%7C%20Oct%203%2C%202015%20%7C%202%3A50%20Doctors%20Without%20Borders%20reacts%20to%20attack%20on%20Afghan%20hospital&ved=0CCIQqQIwAmoVChMIsOSw0tOwyAIVEzKICh0eRw2O&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2015%2F10%2F08%2Fworld%2Feurope%2Fkunduz-afghanistan-hospital-doctors-without-borders.html&usg=AFQjCNHntThFExiN4jLBeeJmPojHG_1UcQ

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/06/why-bombing-kunduz-hospital-was-probably-a-war-crime/

Obama's speach to UN / SEPT 28 2015

Excerpts from Obama's speach:

"We, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backwards," he said. "We live in an integrated world, one in which we all have a stake in each other's success. We cannot turn back those forces of integration."

"A politics and solidarity that depend on demonizing others, that draws on religious sectarianism or narrow tribalism or jingoism may at times look like strength in the moment, but over time its weakness will be exposed. And history tells us that the dark forces unleashed by this type of politics surely makes all of us less secure. Our world has been there before. We gain nothing from going back.
Instead, I believe that we must go forward in pursuit of our ideals, not abandon them at this critical time. We must give expression to our best hopes, not our deepest fears. This institution was founded because men and women who came before us had the foresight to know that our nations are more secure when we uphold basic laws and basic norms, and pursue a path of cooperation over conflict. And strong nations, above all, have a responsibility to uphold this international order."

... "in the old ways of thinking, the plight of the powerless, the plight of refugees, the plight of the marginalized did not matter. They were on the periphery of the world’s concerns. Today, our concern for them is driven not just by conscience, but should also be drive by self-interest. For helping people who have been pushed to the margins of our world is not mere charity, it is a matter of collective security."

"To believe in the dignity of every individual, to believe we can bridge our differences, and choose cooperation over conflict -- that is not weakness, that is strength. (Applause.) It is a practical necessity in this interconnected world"

"we are called upon to offer a different type of leadership -- leadership strong enough to recognize that nations share common interests and people share a common humanity, and, yes, there are certain ideas and principles that are universal."


Full text:
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/president-obama-un-speech-transcript-full-text-video-214152

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6oxByE_lEU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/obama-talk-syria-isis-during-u-n-address-n434816

http://abcnews.go.com/US/president-obama-decries-support-syrias-assad/story?id=34100522

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/27/politics/obama-un-general-assembly/

Andromeda,our nearest neighbor galaxy, in all its glory!

Jaw-dropping Andromeda galaxy photo comprises 37 hours of exposure, originally appeared on CNET.com
This image was taken from earth by a pair of "backyard" astrophotographers who collaborated to produce a stunning image of our nearest galactic neighbour.www.cnet.com

Michelle Starr
September 24, 2015


It has been the focus of a lot of attention. Its proximity makes it brilliant for studying spiral galaxy construction, which helps understand our own spiral galaxy. Space telescopes such as the Hubble and the Spitzer have spent a lot of time photographing it, and we've seen it in many forms: infrared, false-colour composite, even enormously high-resolution at 1.5 billion pixels.
the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that Andromeda contains one trillion stars 1,000,000,000,000 =10^12
: at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion.

We can't, for obvious reasons, take photos of our own Milky Way galaxy within which we are embedded.
Luckily, our closest major galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, at 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda, 220,000 light years across, it is the largest galaxy of the Local Group,
The image you see here, showing the Andromeda Galaxy in visible light, was captured and processed by two astrophotographers right here on Earth, US-based David Lane and Finland-based J-P Metsavainio.
Using a STL-11000M, 35mm format, 11-megapixel CCD Camera by SBIG coupled with a William Optics Gran Turismo 81 telescope, data collection was Lane's contribution. For 37 hours (non-consecutive), he trained camera and telescope at the tiny section of sky wherein the Andromeda Galaxy lies. He shot 18 hours of visible light exposure, one hour through a hydrogen alpha filter to pick out ionised hydrogen details and six hours each with a red, green and blue filter.

The raw images obtained from these exposures were then sent to Metsavainio, who corrected the optical distortion caused by the telescope using CCDStack 2software. He then combined the images and adjusted the levels and curves using PhotoShop CS3. This is similar to the processing applied to images obtained from space telescopes.The resulting image shows Andromeda in all her glory.



The Andromeda Galaxy(also known as Messier 31)is a lot bigger than the Milky Way. It contains around a trillion stars, compared with the Milky Way's estimated 200 billion to 400 billion stars. It also measures around 220,000 light-years in diameter, compared with the Milky Way's 100,000 light-years.
The Andromeda Galaxy is estimated to be 1.5×1012 solar masses,[7] while the mass of the Milky Way is estimated to be 8.5×1011 solar masses.

Because it's so big and so close, it's one of the brightest Messier objects in the night sky and can be seen with the naked eye on a moonless night from a dark location.

Here's its size relative to the moon as seen from Earth. Given that it's so much farther away, you can start to get some idea of how massive it is.Fun fact: The Andromeda Galaxy is moving through space at a rate of around 400,000 kph (250,000 mph)... directly toward the Milky Way. In roughly four billion years, the two are going to meet in a galactic collision of epic proportions, and probably merge into a giant super-galaxy.