This short note opens the Comment section for Sunday, December 21, 2025.

My Saturday “Holiday Livestream” is here: Live with Robert B. Hubbell.

Pro-democracy protest photos.

Nearly 10,000 Minnesotans braved blustery 14° weather Saturday, Dec. 20, to make a 1.5-mile march along Lake Street, from Mercado Central to the Karmel “Somali” Mall, showing solidarity with neighbors who face terror sown by arbitrary, unnecessarily violent ICE detentions and disappearances.

On this cloudy rainy Saturday, many different groups from immigrants rights, labor and Indivisible came together to say ICE OUT OF HOME DEPOT. The march was through a Latino neighborhood to Home Depot, that is popular with day laborers. They were greeted by the Overpass Visibility Brigade with traveling letters, and then went into the store to buy and return ice scrapers. The mood was festive, musical, and communal!

Windsor, VT.

Bradford, VT.

Daily Dose of Perspective

Much of astronomy is spent peering through a telescope at dim, fuzzy objects. (That’s actually a lot more exciting than it sounds!) For obvious reasons, astrophotographers share photos that depict bright, colorful objects. Most of the bright, colorful objects are in our home galaxy (The Milky Way) and relatively close to Earth.

Objects outside the Milky Way may not be visually interesting, but they are remarkable for their distance from Earth. The image below shows my attempt to photograph galaxy PGC 11179.

The photo below shows a very faint galaxy, PGC 11179, which is 325 million light-years from Earth. The first photo shows the full-sized image, while the second zooms in on galaxy PGC 11179.

For perspective, the light from PGC 11179 began its journey to Earth 80 million years before the rise of the dinosaurs (i.e., 245 million years ago). When the light from PGC 11179 began its journey to Earth 325 million years ago, all of the continents on Earth were part of the single supercontinent Pangea. It arrived in my backyard on December 20, 2025—right on schedule!

Enjoy!

[Note, I increased the temperature, hue, and contrast in the zoomed photo to highlight PGC 11179.]

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