Happy Valentine's Day to all of our clients and friends! Thank you for all that you do to build community in service of sustainability, transparency, human rights, personal integrity, civic engagement, tax fairness, shared prosperity, and more.

We ran across this cool NASA photo of a heart-shaped gas cloud today on Discover's Bad Astronomy blog:

This image is of a region called W5, part of a bigger complex of gas and dust shining 6000 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. The resemblance to a Valentine is remarkable!

What you're actually seeing here is an enormous star-forming factory 150 light years across. Deep in its (haha) heart massive, hot, and bright stars are being born. When they switch on for the first time, they blast out a flood of ultraviolet light as well as a fierce wind of subatomic particles. These eat away at the cloud from the inside-out, forming an enormous cavity. It's the edges of this cavity that form the cosmic valentine.

We're especially fond of cosmic imagery like this because nothing illustrates nature's habit of forming groups (and groups of groups) better than galaxies -- which are groups of star systems, which are groups of  planets and asteroids, which are groups of... you get the picture. We look forward to continuing to work with you building the infrastructure to support movements for a greener, kinder, more prosperous world.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

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