Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 6:30 Eastern. Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the auto-publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometime, the diarist du jour shows up much later, that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Just let us know in the comments. You can click on the Morning Open Thread "heart" if you'd like us to show up in your stream every day.
Doing one of these diaries is a good way to get your feet wet if you have been hesitant about writing a diary. You can write as much or as little as you want. The audience here is always supportive.
In February of this year, the Hubble Space Telescope caught this image using the Wide Field Camera 3.
It is a bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, (S106 for short) which looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched “wings” of the nebula are actually the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star, forming the wings.
~ Hubble's Snow Angel
Harbin, China is located in the Heilongjiang Province which is the most north-easterly part of China and borders Russia. During the long cold winter months the temperature can drop down to as low as -22°F (-30°C). It is the host city of the Harbin International Ice Festival which begins every year on January 5th and lasts until the end of February, weather permitting.
Here are some amazing photos.
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A 6 person Twin Cities champion snow sculpting team will represent Minnesota and the U.S. in the International Snow Sculpting Competition at China’s Harbin Ice and Snow Festival 2012. The Minnesota Big Snow group of 6 is the only U.S. team invited to this competition.
More stunning snow sculptures from the Harkin Festival can be viewed here.
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It seems there are several other snow sculpting competitions around the world and the U.S. One of the largest U.S. competitions is located in Colorado, it is the International Snow Sculpture Championship held in Breckenridge. You can view photos of past years here.
Here you can find galleries from Breckenridge and Vermont's State Snow Sculpture competitions.
As a wrap up, here you can view Digital Life's 10 chilling super-nerdy snow sculptures.
*Programming Note*
This week our line up has changed. We will post every day at 6:30 as usual, but we have one guest host this week and a couple of change ups from the regular writers. Here's the schedule for this week:
Monday(That's Today!!) JaxDem
Tuesday Fiddlegirl
Wednesday eeff
Thursday exlrrp
Friday eeff Phil S 33
Saturday (Christmas Eve) gulfgal
Sunday (Christmas Day) JaxDem