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1. Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, has been making herself known this week by creating a 1,000-foot-high lava fountain and leaving her hair clippings far and wide on The Big Island.
2. I have April's Religious Holiday calendar, which includes holidays important to the Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, and Bahá'í faiths.
3. April's full moon, the Paschal Moon, also called the Pink Moon, is the first spring moon and marks the start of Passover and the one-week countdown to Easter.
4. In The Next Gen, I'm catching up with OliviaVasquez Theodorakas, a young rising tennis star from last August.
5. In Performing Arts, I am featuring the Tucson performance by violin virtuoso Joshua Bell and his wife, soprano Larisa Martinez, of new compositions by John Corigliano based on Tennesee Williams texts.
6. In Around Town, I'm featuring the world-famous Kitt Peak National Observatory, which is just 90 minutes away from Tucson.
7. In The Heavens, I have the latest from the Kitt Peak National Observatory on progress in their five-year project to create a 3D map of the universe by measuring dark energy.
8. In Travel, Katy Perry and her fellow celebrity crewmates will make history when they liftoff in Blue Origin on April 14th to become the first all-female spacecraft crew.
| | Now, to this week's Flock. | | 1. Volcanoes: Kilauea Lava Fountain | | The Big Island of Hawai'i is a favorite place of mine and a popular destination for many people year-round. This year, Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, has been active, displaying her glory from the Kilauea volcano by spitting lava high and wide. This past week saw the 16th event in the current series of eruptions that began in December last year. A dramatic lava fountain, over 700 feet high, developed on Tuesday, creating strings of volcanic glass known as Pele's hair and sending tephra, ash and fragments of volcanic rock, far outside the bounds of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park. The debris caused enough of a hazard to close Highway 11, the main route from Hilo to Kona. If you are visiting the island and witness debris falling from the sky, do not stop. Stay in your car, close your windows, and move on carefully. | | Kilauea High Lava Fountains Send Volcanic Tephra Onto Highway 11 | | From: Big Island Video News, April 1, 2025 | | |
The high lava fountain phase of Episode 16 in the Kīlauea summit eruption began at 10:24 a.m. on Tuesday, April 1st, prompting an alert from emergency officials.
The Hawaiʻi County Civil Defense issued a radio message, warning residents that tephra from the eruption was “being carried aloft and falling onto Highway 11 (Hawaii Belt Rd) in Kaʻū District between the 35 and 37 Mile Markers.”
“If you are in this area, please do not stop, do not get out of your vehicle, and keep your window fully rolled up,” the emergency officials said in the 12:49 p.m. message. “There are no road closures at this time, however, road closures could occur without notice.”
…At south vent, small spatter fountains were first observed by field crews at 8:30 a.m. HST on April 1, but they probably were active deeper in the vent prior to that time. The south vent became more active at 10:12 a.m. HST on April 1 and began producing significant lava flows. Fountains in this episode are likely to exceed 1000 feet (300 meters) similar to episode 15. More details about the start of episode 16 can be found in the Kīlauea Daily Update.
| | Kilauea High Lava Fountains Send Volcanic Tephra Onto Highway (April 1, 2025) | | photo: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park | | |
When Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano is erupting, it can produce many different threats such as ash, volcanic gas and lava.
While those are some of the most common types of hazards associated with volcanoes, officials have frequently warned of a unique type of danger from Kilauea called “Pele’s hair.”
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photo: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park
A curl of Pele's Hair
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According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Pele’s Hair is made of thin strands of volcanic glass that are drawn out from molten lava. A single strand can have a diameter of less than 0.5 mm and reach a length as long as 2 meters (6.5 feet).
"The 'hairs' form when lava is ejected violently from a vent, leaving small strands of molten material that solidify in air," the USGS said on its Facebook page.
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photo: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park
Pele's Hair in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park
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Officials urge residents to minimize exposure to these volcanic particles, as they can cause irritation to the skin and eyes.
Pele’s hair can also scratch glass and car finishes, so it’s recommended that people use plenty of water to rinse Pele’s hair off vehicles and avoid using windshield wipers.
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2. Religious Holiday Calendar: April 2025
| | April is a busy month for religious holidays. This month, we have holidays important to the Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, and Bahá'í faiths. | | Religious Holidays: April 2025 | | |
Rama Navami
Apri 5, 2025
Rama Navami is a Hindu festival that celebrates the birth of Rama, one the most popularly revered deities in Hinduism, also known as the seventh avatar of Vishnu. He is often held as an emblem within Hinduism for being an ideal king and human through his righteousness, good conduct and virtue.
Affiliation: Hindu
Source: Wikipedia
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Passover
April 12 - April 20, 2025
Passover, also called Pesach, is a major Jewish holiday, one of the three pilgrimage festivals, that celebrates the Biblical story of the Israelites' escape from slavery in Egypt.
Affiliation: Jewish
Source: Wikipedia
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Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025
Palm Sunday is the Christian moveable feast that falls on the Sunday before Easter. The feast commemorates Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, an event mentioned in each of the four canonical Gospels. Its name originates from the palm branches waved by the crowd to greet and honor Jesus Christ as he entered the city.
Affiliation: Christian
Source: Wikipedia
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Vaisakhi
April 14, 2025
Vaisakhi, also pronounced Baisakhi marks the first day of the month of Vaisakh and is traditionally celebrated annually on 13 April and sometimes 14 April. It is seen as a spring harvest celebration primarily in Punjab and Northern India. Further, other Indian cultures and diaspora celebrate this festival too.
Affiliation: Sikh
Source: Wikipedia
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Good Friday
April 18, 2025
Good Friday, also known as Black Friday, Holy Friday, Great Friday, Great and Holy Friday, or Friday of the Passion of the Lord, s a solemn Christian holy day commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus and his death at Calvary (Golgotha). It is observed during Holy Week as part of the Paschal Triduum.
Affiliation: Christian
Source: Wikipedia
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Easter
April 20, 2025
Easter, also called Pascha (Aramaic, Greek, Latin) or Resurrection Sunday, is a Christian festival and cultural holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day of his burial following his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvary c. 30 AD. It is the culmination of the Passion of Jesus, preceded by Lent (or Great Lent), a 40-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance.
Affiliation: Christian
Source: Wikipedia
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Ridván
April 21, 2025 - May 2, 2025
Riḍván is a twelve-day festival in the Bahá'í Faith, commemorating Bahá'u'lláh's declaration that he was a Manifestation of God. In the Bahá'í calendar, it begins at sunset on the 13th of Jalál, which translates to the 20th or 21st of April, depending on the date of the March equinox.
Affiliation: Bahá'í
Source: Wikipedia
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Yom HaShoah
April 23, 2025 - April 24 2025
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah (Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its allies, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.
Affiliation: Jewish
Source: Wikipedia
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Yom HaZikaron
April 29, 2025 - April 30, 2025
Yom HaZikaron, in full Yom HaZikaron LeHalelei Ma'arkhot Yisrael ul'Nifge'ei Pe'ulot HaEivah, is Israel's official remembrance day, enacted into law in 1963. While Yom HaZikaron has been traditionally dedicated to fallen soldiers, commemoration has also been extended to civilian victims of terrorism.
Affiliation: Jewish
Source: Wikipedia
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Yom HaAtzma'ut
April 30, 2025 - May 1, 2025
Yom Ha'atzmaut (Day of Independence) is Israel's national day, commemorating the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. It is marked by a variety of official and unofficial ceremonies and observances.
Affiliation: Jewish
Source: Wikipedia
| | 3. The Moon: April's Full Moon | | April's Full moon will be a micromoon, the opposite of a supermoon, and appear slightly smaller than usual because the moon will be its furthest distance from the Earth in its elliptical orbit. It is also the first full moon after the spring equinox, setting the date for both Passover and Easter. Passover begins on the 15th day of Nisan, corresponding to the first full moon after the spring equinox. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. | | April brings one of the most spectacular moons: The full pink moon can be seen from these locations in the US | | The Paschal Moon marks the first full Moon of spring and and is used to determine the date of Easter. Here’s all the information you need not miss this year’s. | | From: AS USA By: Andy Hall, March 31, 2025 | | |
Easter is just around the corner and with it, and marking the occasion, a phenomenon that is one of the most anticipated events of the year. The Paschal Moon marks the first full Moon of spring - it appearance is used to determine the exact date on which Easter falls. Easter falls between March 22 and April 25, depending on when this full moon occurs.
Why is it called a Pink Moon?
It’s sometimes called the Pink Moon but that is a misnomer as the moon will be bright white as usual. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, “The name comes from the early spring bloom of a wildflower native to eastern North America: Phlox subulata, commonly known as creeping phlox or moss phlox. This flower, often called “moss pink,” was in full bloom around April’s full Moon".
The Pink Moon, therefore, isn’t an astronomical event that alters the satellite’s color but rather a cultural interpretation connected to nature’s rhythms. As one of the twelve full moons that occur each year, its name stands out for its deep association with the northern hemisphere’s springtime, especially the blooming of these vibrant pink flowers.
| | 4. The Next Gen: Catching up with Olivia | | I first featured Olivia last August when she wowed the crowd at the US Open Match Point Exhibition for Youth in New York City. She has continued to hone her tennis skills and recently finished second in the 12 and under age group of her first Mexican national tennis tournament. She has started playing competitive travel tennis and hopes to compete in Division I eventually. I do not doubt that we will see her there. Along with tennis, Olivia is a member of her school’s surf team and is currently training for her first surf tournament. It’s not all athletics for this rising star. She finished this semester with straight A’s and has been volunteering at a school for students with special needs, which has been a meaningful experience for her. | | Los Cabos Regional Tournament participants. | |
5. Performing Arts: Joshua Bell & Larisa Martinez
| | Earlier this week, I watched virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell and his wife, acclaimed opera soprano Larisa Martinez, perform new compositions" by Grammy and Academy Award-winning composer John Corigliano as part of the Tucson Desert Song Festival. The new compositions are a song cycle based on the writing of Tennesee Williams. I subscribed to a live stream of the sold-out concert made available by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. It was a spectacular and moving performance, and we are lucky to be able to attract such high-caliber artists to perform in Tucson. | | 'Red Violin' composer turns to Tennessee Williams for Tucson premiere | | From: Tucson.com, By: Cathalena E. Burch, March 29, 2025 | | |
When composer John Corigliano accepted the Best Original Score Academy Award for “The Red Violin” in 2000, he thanked all the usual suspects, from the director and producer to the record label that put out the soundtrack from the 1999 film.
But his highest praise came for violinist Joshua Bell, who played on the soundtrack.
“... You can write all the notes you want, but if someone doesn’t play them like a god, they’ll never sound that way. And Joshua Bell, the great violinist, played them like a god,” he said.
…Initially, Corigliano was a maybe when George Hanson, the song festival’s former festival coordinator, pitched the idea in 2022. But after he suffered a hand injury, Corigliano’s maybe was sounding more like a no.
A chance meeting between Bell and Corigliano a few weeks later led to the final yes.
“There’s not a composer I would more desire a song cycle from,” Bell said.
Corigliano will be in the University of Arizona’s Crowder Hall audience on Wednesday, April 2, when Bell, Martínez and their accompanist, Peter Dugan, perform the world premiere of his song cycle, “Tennessee Songs.” co-commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and Jeannette Segel.
At the suggestion of his spouse, fellow composer Mark Adamo, Corigliano set the texts from Tennessee Williams’ poems “My Little One,” “Carousel Tune,” “Across the Space,” “The Beanstalk Country,” “Life Story” and “Towns Become Jewels” to songs.
“They are just wonderful,” he said. “He’s a wonderful writer, and he’s funny and wicked and angry and mad, and he’s got so many moods in his poetry that I right away said, yes, I could do this.”
Corigliano, whose resume includes five Grammys and a Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 Symphony No. 2 for String Orchestra, created music that fit the mood of the texts.
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6. Around Town: Kitt Peak Observatory
| | Just 90 minutes southwest of Tucson sits one of the world's premier observatories with over 20 optical and radio telescopes atop Kitt Peak in the Quinlan Mountains. The Kitt Peak National Observatory offers a variety of tours and programs, including daytime guided facility tours, nighttime group observation programs, and overnight opportunities to stargaze through one of the observatory's telescopes in private. A visit to Kitt Peak is a great way to promote an interest in science to young students. | | Kitt Peak National Observatory | | |
About KPNO
Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a Program of the NOIRLab. KPNO hosts the facilities of consortia that, between them, operate more than a dozen optical telescopes and two radio telescopes.
KPNO operates the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope on behalf of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey (a project led by the US Department of Energy Office of Science) and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope (a partnership between Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Missouri-Columbia, Purdue University, the NSF and NASA).
| | Nighttime Observing Program | |
Established in 1964 and in its sixth decade of operations, the Kitt Peak Visitor Center has been enjoyed by more than two million people. Our guests experience the largest and most diverse collection of research telescopes in any one place in the world. Three of the nearly two dozen active telescopes on Kitt Peak are dedicated solely to public viewing in our world-renowned nightly stargazing programs.
The mission of the visitor center is to inspire a sense of wonder and awe about the Universe through exhibits, daytime tours, and nighttime public programs. Our goal is to inform and educate the public daily about basic astronomy, its current research themes, and the nature of the scientific process.
| | 7. The Heavens: DESI Measures Dark Energy to Map the Universe | | Kitt Peak's DESI, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, is a one-of-a kind scientific research instrument integrated into an existing telescope. The observatory is using it to create a three-dimensional map of the universe. | | DESI Looks 11 Billion Years Into the Past to Reveal Most Detailed View Ever of the Expanding Universe | | Using first-year data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Survey, astronomers have reported unprecedented measurements of dark energy and its effect on the expanding Universe | | |
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument is conducting a five-year survey to create the largest 3D map of the Universe ever. Astronomers are now performing initial analysis of the survey’s first-year data. Using spectra of nearby galaxies and distant quasars, astronomers report that they have measured the expansion history of the Universe with the highest precision ever, providing an unprecedented look at the nature of dark energy and its effect on the Universe's large-scale structure.
Since beginning its survey of the sky in 2021 the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has observed a new set of 5000 galaxies every 20 minutes, totaling more than 100,000 galaxies per night, in its quest to create the largest 3D map of the Universe ever. Using the survey’s first-year data, which contains the largest extragalactic spectroscopic sample ever collected, astronomers report that they have measured the Universe’s expansion history over the last 11 billion years with a precision better than 1%. These measurements confirm the basics of our best model of the Universe, while also uncovering some tantalizing areas to explore with more data.
DESI is an international science collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world. DESI is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with primary funding from the Department’s Office of Science. The instrument is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF NOIRLab.
To map the cosmos, DESI collects light from millions of galaxies across more than a third of the entire sky. By breaking down the light from each galaxy into its spectrum of colors, DESI can determine how much the light has been redshifted, or stretched to a longer wavelength, by the expansion of the Universe during the billions of years it traveled before reaching Earth. In general, the higher the redshift the further away the galaxy is.
| | 8. Travel: All-star Female Crew prepare for Spaceflight | | Blue Origin’s historic all-female space crew, Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn assembled in person for a special ELLE April digital cover. credit:Celeste Sloman for ELLE | | How Katy Perry and Blue Origin's all-female crew are preparing for space | | From: ABC News, By: Katie Kindelan, April 2, 2025 | | |
The countdown is on for an all-female crew, headlined by singer Katy Perry, to blast off to space on a Blue Origin rocket.
For the April 14 flight on New Shepard, Perry will be joined by journalist Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, filmmaker Kerianne Flynn and journalist and helicopter pilot Lauren Sánchez, who is engaged to Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos.
The all-female crew's mission to space will be the 11th manned spaceflight for New Shepard and the first all-female spaceflight crew since 1963, according to Blue Origin.
The flight will last only around 11 minutes and reach a height of about 65 miles above Earth. The Kármán line, considered the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, is 62 miles, so Perry and her fellow crew members will not actually be launched into orbit.
| | Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez & All-Female Crew Gear Up For Space Trip: Know Everything Here | | |
credit: NASA, ESA,STSci, and hubble Space Telescope
In Bloom
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Your fan and friend,
Beth
| | | The information and materials contained or referenced in this newsletter are for informational purposes only and not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a physician or other qualified medical professional with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before beginning a new health care regimen. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking medical advice or care based on anything contained in this newsletter. | | | | |
