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ePostcard #100: Celebrating Magellanic Clouds
ePostcard #100: Celebrating Magellanic Clouds #1. Photo Credit and Caption: Y. Beletsky (LCO)/ESO. The VISTA (the acronym for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is the most famous telescope at the Paranal Observatory. The observatory is located on...
ePostcard #99: Strait Through: Magellan’s Voyage (Part V)
ePostcard #99: Strait Through: Magellan's Voyage (Part V) By Magellan’s calculations, the expedition was months behind schedule. They should have found the strait by now and been on their way to the Spice Islands. On October 18, having been bedeviled by foul weather...
ePostcard #98: There Be Giants: Magellan’s Voyage (Part IV)
ePostcard #98: There Be Giants: Magellan's Voyage (Part IV) We rejoin Magellan’s Armada de Molucca in late February as it continues south along the coast of Argentina in search of the elusive strait—if it even exists. Magellan has now adopted measures to ensure that...
ePostcard #97: False Passage: Magellan’s Voyage (Part III)
ePostcard #97: False Passage: Magellan's Voyage (Part III) Magellan wasn’t bluffing when he told Spain’s King Charles that he absolutely knew where to find the strait. Although his plans were veiled in the competitive secrecy of the age, Magellan had a specific...
ePostcard #96: Magellan’s Voyage (Part II)
ePostcard #96: Magellan's Voyage (Part II) Sea Passage to Rio de Janeiro It was only the first leg of the voyage and the Armada de Molucca had already weathered 60 days of furious and unrelenting storms at sea. The men were exhausted, much of the expedition’s food...
ePostcard #95: Magellan’s Voyage into the Unknown (Part I)
ePostcard #94: Magellan's Voyage into the Unknown (Part I) Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães In Portuguese) was only 12 years old when Christopher Columbus landed in the New World. Born into a family of minor nobility, Magellan served as a page in the royal...
ePostcard #94: Magellan’s Chronicler: Antonio Pigafetta
ePostcard #94: Magellan's Chronicler: Antonio Pigafetta On September 8, 1522, the crew of the Victoria cast anchor in the waters off of Seville, Spain, having just completed the first circumnavigation of the world. The rest of the fleet was gone: the Santiago...
ePostcard #93: Prologue: Magellan’s Voyage into the Unknown
ePostcard #93: Prologue: Magellan's Voyage into the Unknown I was first to circle the world by means of sails,Carrying you, Magellan, leader, through the new strait.Therefore am I justly called Victoria [Victory].With sails as wings, and glory my prize, I fought the...
ePostcard #92: The Age of Discovery
ePostcard #92: The Age of Discovery Modern exploration had to be an adventure of the mind, a thrust of someone’s imagination, before it became a worldwide adventure of seafaring….The pioneer explorer was one lonely man thinking. —Daniel Boorstin, The...
ePostcard #91: Tierra del Fuego: The View from Space
ePostcard #91: Tierra del Fuego: The View from Space I am the albatross that waits for youat the end of the world.I am the forgotten souls of dead marinerswho passed Cape Hornfrom all the oceans of the earth.But they did not diein the furious waves.Today they...
ePostcard #90: Ready to Fly (Black-browed Albatrosses)
ePostcard #90: Ready to Fly (Black-browed Albatrosses) Since their first glimmerings in dinosaurs about 250 million years ago, feathers have evolved into one of nature’s most powerful and beautiful adornments. Feathered flight, of course, evolved with a suite of...
ePostcard #89: Pair-Bonding—Black-browed Albatrosses!
ePostcard #89: Pair-Bonding—Black-browed Albatrosses! We celebrate the wonder of black-browed albatrosses with our final two ePostcards from the Falklands/Malvinas. Before we go, however, we must preen our own “feathers" for the long flight to the southern tip of...
ePostcard #88: Darwin’s Stone Streams (Falklands/Malvinas)
ePostcard #88: Darwin's Stone Streams (Falklands/Malvinas) Among the most spectacular landscape features of the Falkland Islands are the vast periglacial blockfields and patterned ground, which occur on such a large scale that their extent can only really be...
ePostcard #87: Charles Darwin, Geologist
ePostcard #87: Charles Darwin, Geologist Credit: Charles Darwin’s portrait was painted in 1840 by George Richmond, four years after he returned from the Beagle voyage. Charles Darwin took his boyhood love of collecting pebbles, his astonishing geologic fieldwork...
ePostcard #86: Adobe Ingenuity (Black-browed Albatross Nests)
Sitting at the edge of a black-browed albatross colony on Steeple Jason Island in 2009, I watched as an albatross added freshly collected chunks of mud to the thick walls of its pedestaled and well-proportioned bowl nest, using its large bill to press each addition...
ePostcard #85: Life in the Rookery (Falkland Black-crowned Night Herons)
ePostcard #85: Life in the Rookery (Falkland Black-crowned Night Herons) My first memory of watching the ghostly silhouette of a black-crowned night heron flying across the night sky goes back to my childhood and a 'hornpoutin’ fishing trip with Grampa Roy. In the New...
ePostcard #84: Mystery of the Curious Wolf
click images to enlargeePostcard #84: Mystery of the Curious Wolf Charles Darwin regarded the Falkland Island wolf as a compelling biological mystery to be solved, and his observations would set the stage for what would become one of the most amazing natural history...