Art of the Hopewell Indians

The Hopewell Culture dominated the Ohio Valley from about 200 BCE to 500 CE. The Hopewell people lived in large villages in river valleys, they practiced a form of agriculture based on native North American plants (no maize or beans), and they built elaborate systems of earthworks at some of their ceremonial sites. They buried their elite dead with fabulous collections of artifacts. Above is a famous hand effigy made of mica, from the Hopewell mound group in Ohio.

Eagle platform pipe from Naples, Illinois, now in the Brooklyn Museum.

The Wray Figurine, showing a shaman in bear costume. From Newark, Ohio.

The Wray shaman has something carved on his lap that most people think is a human head. Is this the head of one of his great ancestors, from which he is drawing spiritual power? Or the head of an enemy over which he is gloating?

Falcon effigy, made of copper.

Small copper "maskette" or amulet.

Panther effigy pipe from Posey County, Indiana.

Beaver effigy pipe.

Mica bird talon from the Hopewell mound group.

The geometric mounds at Newark, Ohio.

And an artist's rendering of moonrise over the Newark Octagon, an event that occurs every 18.6 years.

For an interesting interpretation of Hopewell culture and politics, see here.

Julien Sinzogan

Contemporary artist, born in Benin in 1958, now living in France. He studied art in France and ran a computer graphics shop for a while before beginning to paint professionally. Unfortunately I can't find any images big enough to do justice to his highly complex works, mostly done with ink on paper. Above, Etat d’esprits: ceux d’en haut (Spirit Worlds: Those on High). As of October 2012 this one was for sale.

Bridge of Creepers, 2007.

Julien Sinzogan II, 2008.

A triptych titled Terre en vue! (Land ho!), 2010.

Totemic Worlds, 2010.

Spirit Worlds II, 2010.

Les Amazones, 2002.

Gates of Return II, 2010. This image is, I think, the key to interpreting Sinzogan's ship drawings. The ships represent in some way the slave ships that carried so many Africans to their deaths. Yet they are not shown as death ships. They seem instead to be vehicles by which the spirit of Africa is carried across the ocean, and I would guess that the splashes of color represent that African spirit, which seems to be taking over these ships and transforming them into something quite different from their builders' intentions. Here we see, not the dreaded Gate of No Return, but a portal to a dazzling spirit world. Traditional west African religion included a belief in reincarnation, and this may show the slaves who died across the sea returning to their homelands to be born again. I love these images, and I am impressed by the approach to slavery's dark history.

L'Armada de Retour, 2002.

Good for Paul Ryan

Like many other Congressmen, Paul Ryan gets lots of letters from people questioning whether President Obama was born in the United States. His office responds by mailing the writers a copy of the President's birth certificate, along with a form letter that says, "I hope you find this information useful."

The House Science Committee, Continued

Today's member of the House Science Committee, serving beside Todd "legitimate rape" Akin, is Representative Paul Broun of Georgia. Broun, a medical doctor, gave a speech to the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman's Banquet in which he said,

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. . . . You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

Today's Castle: Dunnottar, Scotland

Dunnottar Castle sits on a picturesque headland on the east coast of Scotland, south of Aberdeen. Most of the standing ruins date to the 15th and 16th centuries; the keep or tower house dates to the 14th. There has been a fortress on the site since at least the 7th century, and the castle here figured in the war between Edward I and William Wallace.

The most famous incident in the castle's history came in 1651, when an English army besieged it for eight months, trying to seize the Scottish crown jewels. The English eventually took the castle by bringing up heavy cannon, but the jewels had been smuggled away. Marks of these cannonballs are said to still be visible on the keep.

The Stange Career of Eugene Genovese

Historian Eugene Genovese died last week at the age of 82, and Steven Hahn as an excellent obituary in The New Republic. Genovese wrote several fine books about the American South, of which my favorite is Roll, Jordan, Roll: the World the Slaves Made (1974). This is the best book I have read on American slavery, packed from end to end (and it is very long) with facts of every sort. Genovese also wrote with great insight about the slave owners, especially in The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) and The Mind of a Master Class (2005), co-authored with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. In the 1960s Genovese was an avowed Marxist, and he once imperiled his academic career by publicly celebrating a Viet Cong victory over US troops. Yet the harshest criticism of Genovese's early work came from the left, and it amounted to the charge that me made American slavery out to be too nice, and too successful. Roll, Jordan, Roll is about accommodation: the accommodation the slaves and their owners reached over labor and living conditions, and the accommodations the slaves made to their lives as human chattel. It is much concerned with religion, and it is possible to come away from some parts of the book with the impression that slaves were able to construct meaningful, fulfilling lives. Genovese's work on slave owners seemed to some people downright apologetic, since he worked very to understand how they justified their situation. This justification, he argued, was rooted in their rejection of commercial capitalism; they saw themselves as leading a more noble, less crass way of life, in which human connections mattered more than cash.

How is a scholar's work related to his politics? Genovese's career offers a fascinating perspective, because over the course of the 1970s he abandoned Marxism and turned toward the right. He did not embrace capitalism, however; instead he turned toward conservative Catholicism and its corporatist critique of commercial society. He and his wife were remarried in the Catholic church and became active in anti-abortion circles. Genovese found himself abandoned by his old political allies and embraced by Southern conservatives, even speaking a few times to audiences of Lost Cause apologists and white supremacists.

What happened? Did those leftists critics of Roll, Jordan, Roll see something in it that I missed, a longing for a world rooted in eternal truths instead of market fluctuations? Was his involvement in Marxism a sort of training for a longer-lasting commitment to the Catholic church, both causes an expression of Genovese's need for an over-arching intellectual framework that would give meaning to his work? Did he come to think that the slave owners were onto something, or was he drawn to them in the beginning because he shared their view of nineteenth-century capitalism?

Of course the Genoveses were not the only left-wing intellectuals who moved to the right after 1970. This was part of the general collapse of left's ambition to remake the world, but it also derived from the failure of many particular leftist initiatives. As a critique of capitalism, the culture of the 60s failed miserably. All its tropes were readily appropriated by savvy marketers pushing new lines of consumer goods (think The Love Bug). Feminism came to mean mostly the right of women to work in the same corporate jobs as men, a victory for equality but at the price of enmeshing yet more people in capitalism's web. People who really wanted a society not dominated by commerce moved out of the leftist mainstream, either toward radical environmentalism or into religious fervor. There was also an aesthetic revulsion on the part of many intellectual Marxists to the reality of the 60s; instead of a more pure and less selfish world we got dirty hippies, race riots, and a surge in out-of-wedlock births, and the disgust these inspired drove many fastidious leftists back to the right. Like many others, the Genoveses found that traditional religion offered a more persuasive alternative to consumer society than Marxism had -- and fortunately for their marriage, they traveled this path together.

Pondering all this, I turn my mind back to Roll, Jordan, Roll. To me, it is simply a great work of scholarship, distilling a staggering amount of learning into a book I greatly enjoyed reading. I refuse to see it as a political manifesto. Everyone has politics, and sometimes they very much get in the way of studying history. But Genovese's politics seem to have driven him to understand the world of slaves and slaveowners on their own terms, and that sort of coincidence is something we can only celebrate.

Geysers on Mars

One of the most interesting features spotted by the high resolution cameras in orbit around Mars are the dark "spiders" that appear on sand dunes in the spring, especially around the South Pole. Most of these measure about 150 to 300 meters across.

They are accompanied by "dark spots."

Dark spots can also appear without spiders,  as in this image.

After much argument, opinion among Mars scientists has coalesced around the notion that both spiders and dark spots are related to carbon dioxide frozen beneath the surface of the dunes. When the dunes war in the spring, some of the CO₂ erupts upward, creating impressive geysers; these are the dark spots with the trailing "shadows." (Artist's reconstruction above.) In other circumstances the sublimating CO₂ travels through channels toward surface vents, creating the spider patterns.

It would be nice to get a close-up look, but so far NASA has deemed it too dangerous to risk one of their precious rovers in an explosive geyser field.

Iran and the Potential of Sanctions

Right now the world is carrying out a great experiment in international relations, with Iran as the guinea pig. The point of the experiment is to find out if economic sanctions, accompanied by endless diplomatic scolding and a bit of saber-rattling, can induce a powerful nation to give up on a major political and military goal. I don't think there is any doubt that Iran is pursuing an atomic bomb. And who can blame them, given that their enemies in Israel and the US talk constantly about attacking their country?

The economic sanctions have been hurting Iranians for some time, but not so much that their government felt compelled to change their course. Now, though, the Iranian currency is collapsing, and there has been some rioting motivated by economic anxiety. So we get to find out: will the Iranian people force their government to give up their nuclear program (or at least cut it way back, to a scale that can be hidden), so as to get the sanctions lifted, or will the government brazen it out and force us to either go to war or accept them as a nuclear nation?

The Helix Nebula

New NASA image of the Helix Nebula that combines infrared and ultraviolet data from two different space telescopes.

Bald isn't Bad

My hair is thinning, and I plan to do absolutely nothing about it. If you ask me, the only really sad thing about hair loss is the ridiculous things some men do to make it look like they still have all their hair. Of all the stupid, petty vanities, this may be the stupidest.

I mention this now because a study recently found that people find bald men to be more "powerful" and "commanding" than men with hair. I suspect this is another utterly bogus bit of pseudoscience, but at least it shows that people don't automatically scoff at the hairless. (The Guardian has a poll up allowing you to compare British leaders and celebrities with and without hair and vote on whether the bald versions are more commanding.)

What I think is undeniable is that bald men look more powerful and commanding than men with hair pieces, hair implants, combovers, and other desperate measures that only call attention to their insecurity.

Bronze Ax Head from Bactria, ca. 2000 BCE

Telling Evolutionary Stories

Anthony Gottlieb explains why you should pay no attention to evolutionary theories of religion:

We do not even know why we are relatively hairless or why we walk on two legs, so finding the origin of religious belief is a tall order.

I find it useful, when contemplating our species, to remember that we still carry around much evolutionary wiring for living like smart baboons. But detailed stories about the origins of complex institutions like marriage or religion are just cocktail party chatter, not evolutionary science.

Two Approaches to Bringing Back the Chestnut

The American Chestnut was the dominant tree of the Appalachian forest, and its disappearance left a  cultural and biological void. Botanists have been working for a century to bring the chestnut back, and Nature has an update on their progress. Two separate efforts are under way. The old-fashioned school has focused on interbreeding American chestnuts with the much smaller Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to the blight that wiped out the American tree. The latest cross breeds are about 96% American and look like the American tree, but they seem to be highly resistant to the blight.

Meanwhile, a more modern group is using gene splicing technology, putting the genes that they think confer fungal resistance to other plants (wheat, Chinese chestnuts) directly into American Chestnut cells, and they are also optimistic.

Perhaps by the time I die there will be tall chestnut trees in American forests again.

The Political Grind

I didn't watch the debate. I hardly ever do, because for someone like me who has been following the race since -- well, pretty much since the last election -- there is nothing new to learn. Debates are often said to be important for the challenger, so he can show that he is "Presidential." But even a leftist like me saw years ago that Mitt Romney was a perfectly plausible President, able to assume the role and handle his share of managing the government. Eventually even the Tea Party-est primary voters came to understand that of the Republican candidates, Romney was far and away the most Presidential. Anyone who followed the primary campaign also already knew that Romney is a good debater.

For people like me, whose minds were made up when the list of candidates were announced, and who  figured out back in June what issues were going to be prominent and what positions each side would take, October is a long, wearying month. We know what we want, and we just sit around and wait for the last 5 percent of the country to make up its mind.

The Phlegraen Fields and the Tunnels of Baiae

Wonderful little article at Smithsonian on the strange tunnel complex at Baiae, on the volcanic northern shore of the Bay of Naples. This area was known in antiquity as the Campi Flegrei, the Fields Devoured by Fire. A relatively quiet period in its geological history corresponded to the glory days of Rome, and the area was developed as a resort with many different sulfurous baths. Since then the underlying volcano has flared up several times, and much of the Roman resort is now under water.

Much survives, though, including a temple complex within which, it was long known, was the opening of a tunnel or antrum running into the hillside:

The antrum at Baiæ proved difficult to explore. A sliver of tunnel, obviously ancient and manmade, disappeared into a hillside close to the ruins of a temple. The first curious onlookers who pressed their heads into its cramped entrance beat a hurried retreat–the pitch-black passageway was uncomfortably hot and wreathed in sulfurous smoke. There the mystery rested while the Second World War intervened, and it was not revived until, early in the 1950s, the site came to the attention of Robin Paget. Paget was not a professional archaeologist. He was a Briton who worked at a nearby NATO airbase, lived in Baiæ, and excavated mostly as a hobby. 

Paget and his friends eventually cleared and mapped the tunnel, and they found that it led to a complex of chambers deep under ground. Within one chamber is an underground stream so hot that it sometimes boils. Theories about the chambers abound: they were the home of the Sybil of Cumae, or they represent a sort of model of the underworld through which initiates would be led, the boiling stream standing in for the River Styx. Whatever it was, it's a very cool site.

Tiny Dinosaurs: Heterodontosaurids

Above, Heterodontosaurus, a very early plant-eating dinosaur smaller than a chicken, shown as a skull and reconstructed with quills.

And a new member is this same family, Pegomastax africanus, just announced by Paul Sereno.

The Bottom of the Well

I'm in my office today, so all I get to see of the bottom of the well at our site in Delaware is these photos just sent in the from the field. Above, the end of the excavation; below, Jason shovels out some of the wet muck in the lowest layers.

Rousseau, the Self, and the Unsolvable Equation of Society

Christopher Bertram in the TLS:

The common thread that runs through Rousseau's work is the question of how to satisfy our most basic human cravings for freedom and recognition in a world of interdependence. Rousseau was obsessed with the idea that as our needs multiplied beyond the point where we could satisfy them using our natural powers, we had become dependent on cooperation with others to get what we want, a theme explored most famously in the Discourse on Inequality. This dependence on others fosters a deformation of the self as people turn themselves into the characters they believe others will find attractive or useful. But we are all playing this game together, and the sense that the love and respect that others show us may just be feigned for instrumental reasons, a sense that derives support from what each of us does ourselves to bend others to our will, gives rise to a deep sense of anxiety and to feelings of pride, vanity, rage contempt, self-loathing and jealousy. We engage with  others not as we "really are" but via an endlessly recursive play of beliefs about what others believe, a play that underpins hierarchies of oppression and domination. These powerful forces simultaneously socialize and isolate us, leading us to suppress our natural sensitivity to the suffering of others and to develop elaborate rationalizations to justify power and position that take the form of political ideologies and moral codes.

Whether this is a fair summary of Rousseau's thought I do not know, but I find it to be a powerful statement of the basic human dilemma. Indeed, it is the basic dilemma of all social animals, as powerful for baboons as for us: We need each other, but find each other very hard to deal with. To provide every member of any community with the respect, love, friendship, and so on that we all want would require solving an unsolvable equation, and we spend our lives struggling with partial solutions. Even the individual problem, of how to get what we want while being true to ourselves, is all but impossible to work out; multiply this difficulty by a million and you see the impossibility of creating a society that feels just to everyone.

USS Michael Murphy in New York

Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) sails past the Statue of Liberty. The ship was named for Medal of Honor winner Michael P. Murphy, killed in Afghanistan in 2005. This is the newest ship in the US Navy, in New York for its formal commissioning on October 6.

The Libertarian Mind

In our ongoing quest to explain why the smartest Americans disproportionately support the dumbest ideology, we bring you some new research on the libertarian personality:

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed "effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks" more than others do. . . .

All Americans value liberty, but libertarians seem to value it more. For social conservatives, liberty is often a means to the end of rolling back the welfare state, with its lax morals and redistributive taxation, so liberty can be infringed in the bedroom. For liberals, liberty is a way to extend rights to groups perceived to be oppressed, so liberty can be infringed in the boardroom. But for libertarians, liberty is an end in itself, trumping all other moral values.

To me the key in that first sentence: libertarians are people without empathy. For them, everything is about keeping anyone else from telling them what to do, even if that means poor people starve and the disabled can't get healthcare.

Economic Growth and Innovation

As Matt Yglesias notes, economists can't explain economic growth:

The embarrassing heart of economics as a discipline is that absolutely nobody has any idea what the sources of long-term prosperity are. Instead, you get phlogiston economics grounded in a mathematical model that tells us the most important thing is the unexplained residual. Then economists fight over how to label the residual. The residual is often labeled "technology" which people associate with the idea of "innovation" so it's often deemed important to try to research where innovation comes from.

Searching for a way to measure innovation, many economists have settled on the number of patents granted. This is crazy; most patents, indeed almost all patents, are granted for economically useless things, and the main variable determining how many patents a country grants is how willing its patent office is to grant patents for new versions of perpetual motion machines. But economists take this stupid datum and perform lots of calculations on it, figuring out, for example, that European countries with generous welfare benefits grant fewer patents per capita than Latin American or Eastern European countries do. But have any of these economists actually read through the patent application to figure out how many are for new interstellar drives relying on magnetic impulse flux control? No,  they have not. So their results are, as Yglesias says, "garbage in / garbage out."

La Bastida: Western Europe's Oldest City?

In southeastern Spain is a fortified hilltop settlement known as La Bastida. Recent excavations have shown that the oldest stone building on the site dates to around 2200 BCE. The culture is called the Argaric, and it developed from previous Neolithic cultures of the same region. Several fortified towns of this culture are known. The construction of the walls and buildings resembles, say the excavators, construction at Troy and other sites of similar date Anatolia. They are certainly among the most impressive European settlements of this early date.

 Pots recovered from the site.

Some of the stone foundations. The site seems to have had large public buildings as well as many small private houses. Burials suggest that the elite saw themselves as warriors.

The Argaric culture endured until around 1500 BCE, when the towns were abandoned. Some archaeologists think an ecological catastrophe, at least partly caused by overgrazing, forest clearing, and too much farming on steep slopes, was responsible for this collapse.

Ancient Cloth from Stinging Nettles

I thought cloth made from stinging nettles was just a theme of old folktales that allowed women to suffer a lot as they worked, like the sister who weaves nettle shirts for her brothers in "The Six Swans." But no. It seems that some of the oldest surviving woven cloth in Europe was woven from stinging nettles, which have fibrous stems that can be made into thread just like flax. Some contemporary wild-herb-gatherers still do this.

This is nettle cloth from Bronze Age Denmark, recovered from a cremation burial dating to around 800 BCE. This burial made the news this week because analysis of the strontium signature in the cloth suggests that the nettles did not grow in Denmark. The cloth must have been traded from someplace with hard bedrock, possibly Switzerland, where the bronze used in Denmark also came from, or Norway.

New Mammal Species in Peru

An expedition to Peru's Tabaconas Namballe National Sanctuary has led to the discovery of at least nine possible new mammal species, including a night monkey and this "enigmatic" porcupine. ("Enigmatic" is zoology-speak for an organism that might be a new, unnamed species but has not yet been certified as such, and might turn out to be a strange-looking individual of a known species.)

Party Identification and Media Narratives

Is the economy good or bad? How would you know?

This is, I submit, a hard question. Yes, the economy goes up and down, but even in a terrible year most people who want jobs have them. High unemployment helps some people, especially those looking for workers. The state of the economy also varies a lot from one region to another; in Maryland, there is no recession.

In modern America, people get their ideas about the economy from the news. And even in the days of network dominance, what the news said about the economy was hardly neutral. I quit watching TV news in the early 90s, when I thought that to get readership all the networks were playing up the recession in a disgraceful way. They kept leading with a story like "Today in Canton, Ohio, another factory closed, and 70 people lost their jobs." As if the closing of a 70-person factory was something newsworthy, and not just another way to scare people into watching. I had a conversion with a grocery store clerk around that time who was surprised, she said, that people were buying extra food for Christmas, since "everybody's out of work and nobody has any money." Since this was in Maryland, where the 1991 recession was very mild, she could only have gotten this impression from the news.

So it does not surprise me at all to hear that how people feel about the economy depends on their political allegiance. Right now, Democrats are much more optimistic about the economy than Republicans, no doubt under the influence pre-election wishful thinking. This is one area in which Republican have no monopoly on delusion, as anyone who remembers 2004 can tell you; back then Democrats were all trying to convince me that the generally positive economic numbers were a lie, and really things were awful.

I do think, though, that this might be a problem for our country in a lot of ways. Does the media narrative of what is going on in the country, however distorted, play a key part in creating whatever sense of national unity we have? Over time, will there be less and less shared experience of being an American, and more experience that is determined by your political party? I wonder.

Back in the Well

Just one feature left to dig at our site in Delaware, so we sent most of the crew on to the next project. Today there were only three of us on the site. We were all working in this well, down deep enough that the wooden lining has been preserved by the nearly constant moisture. Here Jason scrapes soil away from the remains of boards along the north side.

A formal photo showing how the lining was built, with posts in the corners supporting the boards on the sides. This well was built around 1770 and filled in around 1820.

The artifacts are getting fewer and farther between, but there is still some good stuff, like this sherd of a pearlware mug.

Baboons Need Friends

Baboons have a hierarchical society, in which some animals rank higher than others. Among females, this rank is mostly inherited; the daughters of high -ranking mothers have high rank. This allows them first access to the best food, and a central position in the group when it is threatened. You might think that this advantage would translate into evolutionary success, but a new study that followed a large troop for seven years found that high-ranking female did not raise more offspring than low-ranking females.

What did make a difference was the strength of the mother's social network. The more "friends" a mother had, and the more friendly interactions, the better her reproductive success. The most successful mothers were the ones that had put the most effort into developing their support networks, through actions like grooming other females and sharing food.

Working bottom up from the trends they found in the baboon's behavior, the researchers grouped the baboons into three distinct personality profiles: "nice," "aloof" and "loner."

Nice females were friendly to all others and often grunted to lower-ranking females to signal reassurance. They formed strong and enduring social bonds with fairly consistent partner preferences over time.

Aloof females were more aggressive and less friendly, and they grunted primarily to higher-ranking females who had infants. They formed weaker bonds but had very consistent partner preferences.

Loner females were often alone and relatively unfriendly; they grunted primarily to appease higher-ranking females without infants. They formed weak bonds with changing partners.

Both "nice" and "aloof" baboons were successful mothers; loners did the worst.

It is generally true that among highly social species like baboons and humans, the most useful skills are social.

Reality is Reality, Whatever Fox News Says

Steve Taylor at Outside the Beltway:

. . . if we cannot agree on what basic reality is, we cannot govern ourselves. I no longer adhere to the Republican Party because the vast majority of the party’s candidates, commentators, and supporters have abandoned the notion that reality is reality. Specifically:  tax cuts do not, in fact, always create GDP growth (we have empirical evidence that clearly demonstrates this fact—see the Bush tax cuts), American power cannot always shape the international system to US preferences (see:  Iraq and Afghanistan), there is climate change (see all the data), and so forth. I will note:  there are real debates to be had about how to deal with these, and other, issues, but we all have to at agree on the fact that a debate needs to take place.  We can debate what to do about the climate and what the the appropriate level of taxes should be, but simply denying that there is climate change is not a policy. Asserting that tax cuts will lead to growth has no basis in reality.

I Can't Wait for 2012 S1

National Geographic:

Even with powerful telescopes, comet 2012 S1 (ISON) is now just a faint glow in the constellation Cancer. But the ball of ice and rocks might become visible to the naked eye for a few months in late 2013 and early 2014—perhaps outshining the moon, astronomers say.

The comet is already remarkably bright, given how far it is from the sun, astronomer Raminder Singh Samra said. What's more, 2012 S1 seems to be following the path of the Great Comet of 1680, considered one of the most spectacular ever seen from Earth.

"If it lives up to expectations, this comet may be one of the brightest in history," said Samra, of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada. . . .

Because 2012 S1 appears to be fairly large—possibly approaching two miles (three kilometers) wide—and will fly very close to the sun, astronomers have calculated that the comet may shine brighter, though not bigger, than the full moon in the evening sky.

The image shows the last spectacular comet, McNaught, in 2007.