February 2 marked the 72nd anniversary of the end of the fearsome Battle of Stalingrad, now Volgorad – the ultimate triumph of the Red Army.  The casualties of this battle were staggering.  It is estimated that “The Axis” suffered 850,000 casualties and the USSR 1,129,619 (wounded, killed, captured). Such was the tragedy of World War Two.  The siege was ended on February 2, 1943.

This anniversary was marked last week and is captured in a very poignant photograph by Dmitry Regulin for the AP. A man dressed in Red Army World War II uniform walks toward the monument to Motherland.  The form of the monument is indistinct.  The fog seems to epitomize the dimness of memory with age and time.  But as the determined figure indicates memory is dim but remembrance essential.

It has been a while since I have blogged about images of weird and eccentric sports events like “wife carry races” and “the Highland Games.  So today I couldn’t resist this image by Carlo Allegri of Reuters of a runner in the 38th Annual Empire State Building Run-Up. Here runner is arriving on the 86th floor.  Here runner is looking pained and not so happy.  It is, of course, a lot like running up a small mountain.  Indeed, I had a colleague back in my postdoc days who used to climb mountains and would practice by donning his hiking boots and running up stairs.

When I first look at this photograph, I feel the man’s pain.  But then I started to look at the compositional elements that really make the image.  The application of the rule of thirds and most interesting the repeating theme of parallel lines, all with perfect internal symmetry but all askew from one another.

In my experience, if you are looking for the epitome of winter glory, you need to look no further than Bavaria in Germany.  I came across this wonderful image by Armin Weigel for the AFP of yesterday’s full moon setting over the parish church of Schoenach near the Bavarian village of Regensburg in Germany.  It’s got everything required the cold blueness and the snow create a sense of absolutely frigid winter. Readers of Hati and Skoll will recognize the allusion to the end of the Norse world, the Gotterdammerung.  And yet the glorious moon hovers and dances in thermal disequillibrium over the church, creating a pale and incongruous golden warmth.

And as for the moon, it will soon be out of the way at night and readers are advised to search out either with naked eye or binoculars the green glory og comet Lovejoy in early February. Cameras out please!

One of the weekly photocolumns that I follow pretty closely is the reader photos to a preset theme.  This week’s theme was “City Skylines” and there are some really wonderful submissions.  I particularly like Michael Kennan’s spectacular skyline of Seattle from Queen Anne Hill.  Then there is Jane Barrett’s cleverly circularized image of the harbor in Stockholm. But my admiration doesn’t stop there.  There is a really interesting image by Owen Bowler of the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth reflected off the water.  This is a particularly subtle and clever variation of the distorted reflection genre of architectural photographs. Finally among my favorites is Daniel Furon’s moody and wonderful image of the San Francisco skyline. Honestly, I have seen a lot of beautiful photographs of San Francisco over the years.  This one takes my breath away.

As Bostonians we just naturally think of the city as the “Hub” of the universe.  As a result, we also naturally expect that everyone knows and cares that we were hit on Tuesday by Nor’easter Juno, which dropped ~24 inches of snow on the Hub and about 30 inches out where I live.  “Inches?” you ask.  Yes, “inches!”  Central to this kind of geocentricism is the view, widely held by Americans, that we should use a silly and antiquated measurement system, that is all together different from that used by the rest of the modern world. Hmm!

Anyway, there is one photograph that is going the explosive viral rounds on the internet showing a man clearing the finish line of the Boston Marathon in the midst of the storm.  Not great photography, but powerful symbolism and meme.

Figure 1 – Newly release photomontage of the Andromeda Galaxy, Messsier 31, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, from NASA and the ESA.

Earlier this month, NASA released a mind blowing photomontage from the Hubble Space Telescope of the Andromeda Galaxy – a 4.3 Gb file..  This is the largest image ever assembled by the Hubble Space Telescope.  At 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda is our nearest galactic neighbor.  The image resolves something like 100,000 stars.  Truly this is like photographing a beach and resolving the individual grains of sand.  The image was assembled from 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings of the telescope.

To understand the enormity of the project and of the galaxy it is best to view it as a reconstructed flyby.  But I have included a still of the image as Figure 1.  I was amazed as I watched the video.  The individual stars becoming denser and denser.  And yet, Andromeda is a relatively small object in the sky.

Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about how depressing it is that everything that you do on a computer, create a file or erase a file, contributes to the unstoppable increase in the entropy of the universe, that slow decline to absolute zero and nothingness.  This image puts it in perspective.  Look at that image of Andromeda and imagine all the galaxies out there including our own.  What are we?

I apologize for returning to the subject of New Year’s ice baths in frozen rivers.  But the Greek Orthodox calendar affords us the opportunity to visit all these themes again, and the look on the lady’s face in this photograph by  Maxim Shipenkov of the EPA,  showing people queuing up for the plunge in celebration of the Epiphany Orthodox holiday in Moscow, Russia,is just to wonderful to ignore. The boy behind her is, of course nonplussed by the icy dip – ah the benefits of youth! The bottom line, no matter what a vigorous race, is that people really need to stop all this ice diving – really not so good for the heart!