The Faces Of War -- Confederate Dead At Sharpsburg

Confederate dead on the Hagerstown Turnpike, north of the Dunker Church near
Sharpsburg, Maryland following the bloodiest single day of the War Between the States (1861-1865).
Photograph taken by Alexander Gardner courtesy of the Library of Congress.

"Before the sunlight faded, I walked over the narrow field. All around lay the Confederate dead...clad in ‘butternut'...As I looked down on the poor pinched faces...all enmity died out. There was no ‘secession' in those rigid forms nor in those fixed eyes staring at the sky. Clearly it was not their war."

       ~Private David L. Thompson, Company G, 9th New York Volunteers surveying the dead after the Battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam Creek), Maryland on Wednesday, September 17, 1862.

The Battle of Sharpsburg still remains America’s bloodiest single day of war, with over 24,000 casualties, including over 5,300 dead.

Never Forget!

The Star-Spangled Banner -- Poem & U.S. National Anthem

Robert McGill Mackall’s 1976 oil painting depicting Mary Young Pickersgil,
her 13 year-old daughter, Caroline, and a niece, Eliza Young, sewing the
Star-Spangled Banner, the U.S. Flag that flew over Fort McHenry
in Baltimore, Maryland during the War of 1812 (1812-1815).
Image courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society.

The Star-Spangled Banner

By Francis Scott Key

*O! say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming:
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming,
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam --
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream;

'Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave.
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave!

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation;
Bless'd with victory and peace, may the Heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just --
And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

*The highlighted first paragraph and chorus make up the U.S. National Anthem.

The Story of the Star-Spangled Banner

The Star-Spangled Banner, U.S. Flag (1795-1818).

In 1813 the United States was once again at war with Great Britain, and the city of Baltimore, Maryland was preparing for an eventual attack by the British.

U.S. Army Major George Armistead, the commander of nearby Fort McHenry near Baltimore Harbor, felt that the fort was prepared for an attack, and only lacked a suitable flag. He expressed this concern in a letter to Major General Samuel Smith, the head of the military commander for Baltimore. Armistead wrote, "We, sir, are ready at Fort McHenry to defend Baltimore against invading by the enemy. That is to say, we are ready except that we have no suitable ensign to display over the Star Fort and it is my desire to have a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance."

It was resolved that the flag of Fort McHenry would be a garrison flag measuring and incredible 30 X 42 feet.

The seamstress commissioned by Armistead to create this large flag was a 29-year-old local widow named Mary Young Pickersgill, the sister-in-law of U.S. Navy Commodore Joshua Barney.

In early summer 1813, she began the job with the assistance of her then 13 year-old daughter, Caroline, her two nieces, Eliza Young and Margaret Young, a 13-year-old African American indentured servant, Grace Wisher, and likely her elderly mother, Rebecca Young -- another notable flag maker. Additional local seamstresses were also hired during the summer.

Pickergill's team worked 10-hour days sewing the flag, using 300 yards of English wool bunting, often working late into the evening, until midnight at times. Initially they worked from Pickergill's home, but as their work progressed they needed more room and had to move to Claggett's Brewery across the street to continue their commission. The ladies were able to complete the job in six weeks and delivered the flag to Fort McHenry on Thursday, August 19, 1813.

The giant 15-Star U.S. flag flew over Fort McHenry peacefully for a year before the fort was attacked by the British Royal Navy during the Battle of Baltimore (September 12-15, 1814).

On Tuesday, September 13, 1814, British warships fired over 1,600 cannonballs and rockets onto Fort McHenry during an often rainy day and evening for nearly 25 hours until the next morning on September 14th.

A week earlier, Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old American lawyer and amateur poet, had boarded the British flagship on the Chesapeake Bay on a mercy mission in hopes of persuading the British to release of Dr. William Beanes, a friend who had recently been arrested and was a prisoner. The British agreed to release Beanes, but both Key and Beanes were forced to stay with the British until the attack on Baltimore was over. Key watched the proceedings from a truce ship under guard on the Patapsco River eight miles away.

On the morning of the 14th, Key saw the large 15-star American flag still waving above Fort McHenry. Inspired by the sight he began jotting down verses to the poem on the back of a letter he was carrying.

His brother-in-law, commander of an American militia at Fort McHenry, later read Key's words and had it distributed under the name "Defence on Fort M'Henry." It would be was printed in the Baltimore Patriot newspaper and, within weeks, Key's immortalized words would appear in print across the country.

Key's poem was later set to the tune of a British song called "To Anacreon in Heaven", the official song of the Anacreontic Society, an 18th-century gentleman's club of amateur musicians in London. The song eventually became known as "The Star-Spangled Banner".

On Wednesday, March 4, 1931 U.S. President Herbert Hoover signed the bill passed by the U.S. Congress the day before officially making the Star-Spangled Banner the official U.S. national anthem.

As for the famous flag itself, following the War of 1812, the original Star-Spangled Banner of Fort McHenry remained in the possession of the Armistead family though some of the flag (including one of the stars) were stripped off and given as souvenirs by Armistead's widow in memory of her husband who died in 1818 and those who fell in defense of the fort. 

One anecdotal story claims that Armistead's nephew, Confederate Brigadier General Lewis "Lo" Armistead, carried a piece of the flag in his uniform coat pocket during the War Between the States (1861-1865) until his death at the Battle of Gettysburg following Pickett's Charge on Friday, July 3, 1863.

Today the restored original Star-Spangled Banner is on permanent display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington D.C.

Night Sky Photography -- 09-12-2021 -- The Red Star Antares & Formalhaut in the Southern Sky

Good evening fellow stargazers!

The summer of 2021 will soon be coming to a close here in the Northern Hemisphere with the arrival of the autumn equinox on Wednesday the 22nd later this month.

Here in my little corner of Dixie, the fireflies will soon disappear for the year -- as will all those loud Cicadas! -- and the sunshine will soon make way for earlier and earlier evening skies. The stars overhead in our sky dome will also change with the tilting of the Earth towards the winter constellations over the next few months.

The bright red star Antares, the summer star for the Northern Hemisphere, will continue to appear to move westward following the setting sun.

This evening Antares was close to our lovely Luna, still a day away from her first quarter phase, and I was able to capture a really good shot of this conjunction just above the tree line.

The 1st-magnitude star Antares is the brightest star in the Constellation Scorpius the Scorpion -- which unfortunately I was unable to capture being too low on the horizon at this time. Its also the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky. Antares is often referred to as "the heart of the scorpion".

The name Antares itself means "The Rival of Ares" (the Greek name for their god of war, Mars for the Romans) because of the star's distinctive red coloring and the fact its noticeably brighter in the sky dome than Mars, except for those times ever two years when the Red Planet is in close opposition to the Earth. In actuality, Mars is actually more of an orange-yellow glow, while Antares is always quite red as you can see in the photo.

Antares is a red supergiant star approximately 604 light-years from our Sun. In terms of size, Antares is about 700 times larger than our own star and about 9,000 times brighter. So big that if Antares replaced our own Sun in our Solar System, it would engulf all of the inner planets and the asteroid belt!

Yet, despite this massive size, Antares is relatively cooler than our sun. Our bright star burns as a whopping 11,000 F while Antares is somewhere around 6,500 F -- still pretty hot, but cool as far as stars go. This lower temperature is what gives Antares its distinctive red coloring.

While Antares appears as a single star when viewed with the naked eye, but it is actually a binary star, with its two components called Scorpii A and Scorpii B. The brighter of the pair is the red supergiant itself, while the fainter is a hot main sequence star.

A couple of hours later into the evening I captured a bright trio in the southeast: the two gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, along with the bright white star Foralhaut.

Fomalhaut (Alpha Piscis Austrinus) is sometimes called the Loneliest Star because it’s the only bright star in a wide stretch of sky. It's also called the Autumn Star because it appears more clearly in the southern sky in the fall months in the Northern Hemisphere. Fomalhaut certainly can be considered to be the star that announces the arrival of fall in the Northern Hemisphere because it stands out in what is otherwise a rather empty region of the autumn sky.

The 18th brightest star in the night sky, Fomalhaut is part of the faint Constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish. The name Fomalhaut derives from the Arabic Fum al Hut, meaning Mouth of the Fish.

Fomalhaut is a hot bluish-white star about 25 light-years away. It’s almost twice the mass and size of our Sun, but radiates at about 17 times the Sun’s energy. Fomalhaut itself is a young star, just 440 million years old. That’s in contrast to the estimated 5 billion years for our Sun. Because Fomalhaut is hotter and brighter than our Sun, it also has a shorter life span of somewhere around 1 billion years. Stars like our Sun have life spans of about 10 billion years.

Both Antares and Fomalhaut are considered to be two of the four key stars of the night sky, sometimes referred to as the Royal Stars, or the Celestial Guardians (or "archangel stars"): Antares as Uriel, the Watcher of the West; Aldebaran representing Michael, the Watcher of the East; Fomalhaut representing Gabriel, the Watcher of the South; and Regulus as Raphael, the Watcher of the North.

Well folks, I hope y'all enjoyed my photos and presentation. Please let me know in the comments below and, as always, have a wonderful Dixie Day and y'all keep your eyes to the night skies, ya hear!

Celebrating the 55th Anniversary Of Star Trek -- 1966 To Present

This historic moment took place on a recreation of the original Enterprise bridge at Destination Star Trek 2016 in
Birmingham, UK. Star Trek alumni from all five major television series, as well as several of the major motion
pictures and guests gathered for this group photo.
Shown here are: William Shatner (James T. Kirk --TOS) is seated in the captain’s chair,
 George Takei (Hikaru Sulu -- TOS) at the helm, and Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov -- TOS) at navigation,
Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi - TNG), Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax -- DS9), Dominic Keating (Malcolm Reed -- ENT),
Armin Shimerman (Quark - DS9), Alice Krige (The Borg Queen - ST First Contact), Chase Masterson (Leeta -- DS9),
Connor Trinneer (Charles "Trip" Tucker III -- ENT), Max Grodenchik (Rom -- DS9),
Jeffrey Combs (Shran -- ENT/Weyoun -- DS9), Nicole de Boer (Ezri Dax -- DS9),
Casey Biggs (Damar -- DS9), Garrett Wang (Harry Kim - VOY), Greg Grunberg (ST - 2009),
along with Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam Nimoy, and Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden.

Photo courtesy of Destination Star Trek and Fandomcons.com.

RIP Ed Asner (1929 - 2021)