Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy and humid with a high of 86. Sunrise is 6:17 and sunset is 7:32 for 13 hours 15 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1916, Ernest Shackleton completes the rescue of all his men stranded on Elephant Island in Antarctica.
America’s contributions to humanity’s understanding of the cosmos are considerable, and they continue with the Nancy Grace Roman telescope:
At 7:26 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope blasted off from the Florida coastline and sailed toward the stars. So begins its journey to capture deep, sweeping views of our universe, as far back as when it was only a few hundred million years old.
Named after the agency’s first chief astronomer, Roman is NASA’s latest and greatest cosmic cartographer. The $4.3 billion telescope will use its sharp infrared vision to chart billions of galaxies, as well as hundreds of black holes and the dusty disks circling young stars, where new planets form. It promises a panorama so wide and so crisp that it would take more than half a million high-definition TVs to display in full.
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Part of the telescope’s appeal, however, lies in whatever surprises may be hiding in the data.
“Roman’s vast reach will allow us to find the weird, the rare and the unusual,” Julie McEnery, who leads Roman’s science team, said at an earlier news conference on Saturday. “We will redefine what it means to find a needle in a haystack.”
Roman has about the same infrared resolution as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, but its field of view is at least a hundred times wider. It is also up to a thousand times faster: In one month, Roman will complete a survey of the sky that could take Hubble a century, Dr. McEnery said.
See Katrina Miller, NASA’s Roman Telescope Leaves Earth to Chart the Stars (‘Astronomers will use data collected by Roman’s wide, deep gaze to study the dark universe and hunt for new worlds’), New York Times, August 30, 2026.
See also Katrina Miller, The Roman Telescope Promises a New Era of Cosmic Exploration (‘NASA’s latest offering to the stars comes from a legacy of great observatories that enabled decades of discovery and unearthed new mysteries about the universe’), August 28, 2026.
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Forthcoming topics (in no particular order): Development in Downtown Whitewater (Follow-Up), A New Ethics Ordinance, Polling Places in the City (Further Considerations), and Steps for a Public Interest Campaign.
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Launch: