This image is the result of a project by a team of five amateur astrophotographers who left their camera shutters open for 1,060 hours, which has to be some kind of record. That's 44 days! The photograph shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light years away.

The image is a mosaic made of 16 smaller fields of view, which, once stitched together form a high-resolution image of 204 Million of pixels! As of matter of fact, this is not the work of a single person but by a team of five french amateur astronomers called "Ciel Austral":  Jean Claude CANONNE, Philippe BERNHARD, Didier CHAPLAIN, Nicolas OUTTERS et Laurent BOURGON.

"Ciel Austral" owns a remotely-controlled observatory located in the most prestigious skies of the planet, in Chile, and more precisely at the El Sauce Observatory (Coquimbo Region). A 160-mm APO-refractor telescope and a Moravian CCD were used to obtain this wonderful field. The datasets were taken over several months, ranging from 2018 and 2019. The heavy files handled represent 620 GB and needed few hundreds of hours to get out of the image processing step! Once stacked together, they make up the stunning figure of 1060 hours of exposure.

Read more about the image at AstroSpace. You can see high-resolution versions of the image at Ciel Austral's gallery. Be aware that they may take some time to load, but it will be worth it just for the opportunity to zoom in and explore the details.  -via Metafilter

When a top athlete is caught using performance-enhancing drugs in an elite competition, like the Olympics, it's big news. But humans will make a competition out of anything, and even the most obscure tests of skill and talent have their cheaters. Even the card game bridge.  

Early 2019 delighted the world with news of the world's #1 Bridge player, Geir Helgemo, being suspended after getting caught doping. Of course, if you read a little deeper, you'll see that Helgemo was using two drugs to increase his testosterone, which increases your Bridge skills in ... no way whatsoever? Maybe his strategy involved intimidating other players with his sudden influx of chest hair?

The World Bridge Federation acknowledged that the drugs weren't performance-enhancing in any way they're familiar with, but because they abide by World Anti-Doping Association guidelines, the substances were still banned. Except why does the World Bridge Federation need to observe the World Anti-Doping Association Guidelines in the first place? What substances do make you better at bridge?

There have been other instances of cheating in bridge tournaments, but they usually involve coded signals between team members. Read more about the bridge tournament, plus cheaters in Scrabble, animal shows, a fishing tournament, and the Iditarod at Cracked.

Engaging Data has an interactive graph that breaks down where American households get their money, and where it goes. At the website, you can change the graph to show subgroups, like the five quintiles of income level or the age of the head of household. There are some interesting differences. In the lowest two quintiles, there's a category called "borrowing and savings," where money is drawn from either the past or the future, that doesn't appear in the other income groups. The lowest quintile has no budget category for savings, while the top quintile saves 26% of income. In every subset, the biggest expense is housing. -via Digg

Piornal, Spain, is a village of only 1600 people, but this past February, the population swelled to 14,000 for the festival of Jarramplas. The character of Jarramplas is a man dressed as a demon, who walks the village streets while being pelted with turnips by excited crowds. The ritual has been around for hundreds of years, and its origins are murky. Is it a pagan fertility ritual? A welcome for spring? A ritual scapegoating? No one is really sure, but they do have fun with it. Despite the physical ordeal, volunteers who become Jarramplas consider it an honor.  

With the fall of fascism in Spain in 1978, the festival began to gain popularity again. It got modernized along the way. Originally, Jarramplas was only protected by layers of clothes. But in the 1990s, tired of seeing volunteers emerge black and blue every year, Díaz says, Piornalegos commissioned a nearby factory to make a fiberglass suit of armor. (Ironically, because the armor weighs so much, Jarramplas now can’t run away from his pursuers very well, and still gets a pretty serious beating.) The original dogskin drum has been replaced with plastic and canvas, and the traditional mask—cardboard decorated with animal blood, charcoal, and olive juice—is now just painted fiberglass topped with horsehair. Instead of gathering leftover turnips, the town council now buys them in mass quantities—this year it was almost 30 tons—from a farmer in a nearby town.

Read what happens during the ritual of Jarramplas at Atlas Obscura.

The island of Alcatraz in the San Francisco was a federal prison from 1934 to 1963. After it was decommissioned, the island was listed as surplus federal property. That designation drew the interest of Native Americans, because under the terms of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, any federal property designated as surplus was to be returned to the natives who originally occupied it. In 1969, after the San Francisco American Indian Center was destroyed by fire, a group of Native American protesters went to Alcatraz and stayed there for 19 months.

Soon about 100 Native Americans, mostly students and activists from urban communities, were living the island that had otherwise seemed destined to fall into decay, or the whims of private developers. By Thanksgiving of 1969, the island had blossomed into a well-rounded community with elected council members, and a regular voting system and 400 occupants.

The first step was getting a running kitchen and sanitation system going, then a clinic, a day-care, and even a radio station run by Trudell, who the FBI described as being “extremely eloquent…therefore extremely dangerous.”

The US government first took a wait and see attitude, but eventually blockaded supplies from reaching the island, and even cut off the electricity. Read about the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz and see plenty of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Bonnie Byler)

Ian McKellen appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1981 and spoke eloquently about the nuts and bolts of acting. Spoiler: it's a lot more complicated than you would imagine. But that's all after you marvel at how young he was here. McKellen was already in his forties, but he certainly doesn't look like the Magneto or Gandalf you know. -via Laughing Squid

One of the first images we got to see from the new movie version of Pet Sematary is that of the zombie cat above. This is not a graphic; it's a real cat actor. A sweet-looking cat actor.

im too scared to see Pet Sematary I think but I would like to say I support how handsome and big that cat is pic.twitter.com/imheRO04Rk

— tom schwartz’s transition lenses (@rachelmillman) April 4, 2019

Gabriella Paiella marveled at the vast difference in the cat's apearance, so she sought out the crew responsible. She spoke to groomer Tanya Graham and trainers Melissa Millett and Kirk Jarrett about how the five cats used for the film were given their movie looks.

Tanya: It took almost two months of training to get them fully comfortable with the makeup. We used a protocol with desensitization to really get them used to that. We started out with just doing a cat in a dry tub having catnip parties. That was a lot of fun. Then we did the cats enjoying the dry tub with lots of treats, so they got some pâté and kitty treats. Then we started doing a little bit of water each time, slowly increasing the amount of water each time just to make sure they were comfortable with that process.

Melissa: We did it so progressively that the cats were comfortable with the bathing and comfortable with the makeup. We knew that if we didn’t acclimate the cats to the makeup, they’re licking it off.

Read about the process of doing a cat's makeup at The Cut. -via Digg

The pastry is called Kouign-amann, which comes from the words for butter and cake. It's like a sugar-butter pie. Great Big Story travels to the town of Douarnenez, France, to learn the history and recipe for Kouign-amann -and to try it out.

The Brothers Grimm did not write all those fairy tales from scratch, but adapted older folk tales and published them. Their versions were changed and edited over several decades, in which they softened the stories up a bit by, for one thing, changing evil parents into evil stepparents. For example, in the original 1810 manuscript for the Snow White story, the princess is a mere seven years old when her evil biological mother decides the child is too pretty to remain alive. She directs a huntsman to kill Snow White and and bring back her lungs and liver as evidence. He does not, but uses the organs of a wild boar instead.  

The subsequent event has been largely forgotten – and rarely shown in film adaptations. When the queen receives her daughter’s viscera, she decides she’ll have them salted and boiled, then feasts upon them with epicurean pleasure, convinced that they’re Snow White’s. The root of her pleasure rests on two facts: she has obliterated her daughter, her rival, but also, crucially, this anthropophagic act preserves the essence of ritual cannibalism – the ancient belief that eating the enemies’ flesh was a source of spiritual and physical strength. By eating Snow White, she believes she will embody her characteristics. The choice of organs is relevant: lungs represent the breath, the spirit; and the liver is a symbol of purification, as it cleanses the blood. In The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar points out that different versions include different “gifts”: the most remembered one is the heart; but in Spain, it’s “a bottle of blood stoppered with the girl’s toe”, whereas in Italy, the huntsman must return with “her intestines and her blood-soaked shirt” or her eyes and a bottle of her blood.

The rest of the gruesome 1810 version also more explicit in detail than the Disney movie. Read about the horrifying story of Snow White at Daily Grail. -via Boing Boing

In 1911, the New York City Tenement House Department (now the NYC Housing Authority) was busy enforcing regulations to improve the slums that housed several million people. The office also had a cat.

The THD office cat was just “a plain yellow cat” that had somehow managed to get on the city payroll even though he did not take the required civil service exam. For the cat’s services as office mouser, he was rewarded with five cents’ worth of meat and five cents’ worth of milk every day.

When the cat’s total expenses had reached $2.30, Commissioner Murphy submitted a bill to City Comptroller William Ambrose Prendergast. The bill, which covered a period from April 5 to April 31, was delivered to the comptroller by James McKeon, a messenger.

The comptroller responded with a letter questioning the legitimacy of the expenditures, which made the papers and amused New Yorkers of the day. Was a the cat indigent, or was he an employee? One newspaper pointed out the lack of competitive bidding for the cat's services. Read the story of the Tenement House Department and their cat at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

The a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) has unveiled their Passover song for 2019. It's a holiday medley set to the tunes of "The Circle of Life," "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," and "Hakuna Matata" from The Lion King. Passover begins this Friday at sundown, and continues through April 27.  

Starbucks has 277,000 employees at 24,000 outlets. That's a lot of coffee, and a lot of baristas, although the company refers to them as "partners." A partner in Florida named AJ lets us in on some of the things that go on behind the scenes, from the other side of the counter, so to speak.

Starbucks has drawn criticism for using Italian words for their drink sizes. A tall is 12 ounces; a grande is 16 ounces; a venti hot, 20 ounces; a venti cold, 24 ounces; and a trenta (only available for certain drinks), 31 ounces. Owing to confusion or indifference, many customers still use the more common "small, medium, large" terms. If you're wondering whether that irritates partners, the answer is no. “I would say 30 percent of people use our terms and know what they mean,” AJ says. Others use the more common sizes, or whatever size they happen to see on the menu. The problem, AJ adds, is when customers order a size in Italian and then complain they didn’t know what it meant, necessitating a time-consuming change in the order.

Read more about the life of a Starbucks employee at Mental Floss.

Cats are an invasive species in Australia, and are killing off the native species. This guy has a wildlife sanctuary of sorts in his back yard, which was discovered by feral cats. So he built a device to deter them from entering. This is not your regular dry DIY video. Sure, he built the device, but the rather entertaining story involves not only a water hose and arduino, but also Kentucky Fried Chicken, a suspected gas leak, yogurt, and polygamous kookaburras.

Earlier this month, 74-year-old Bill Heine passed away as a result of cancer. You might not know him by name, but you certainly know about his house. Heine bought a home in Oxford in 1986, and asked a friend if he could think of something to "liven it up."

His friend, the sculptor John Buckley, provided an answer in the shape of an eight-metre (25ft) shark which would sit on his roof, perpetually appearing as though it had just crashed into the house from the sky. The fibreglass fish, which became known as the Headington Shark after the Oxford suburb, led Heine, a local journalist and businessman who died last week, into a six-year legal battle with the local council.

The process turned a relatively unremarkable street into a beloved local landmark and resulted in one of the most notable triumphs of British eccentricity over petty bureaucracy.

You know how that battle turned out, since the shark is still crashing through the roof 33 years later, but you'll enjoy learning the details of how the Headington Shark came about, at the Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Henry Flower)

Neatorama readers know that Tristan de Cunha is the most isolated community in the world. It has fewer then 300 residents, and they were mostly born there. But which city is the most isolated in the world? Living in an isolated city means a high cost of living, since supplies have to be shipped in. And going anywhere would mean taking a plane. To find the answer, first you have to define "isolated" and "city." For this video from Half As Interesting, "city" is eventually defined as any place with more than 100,000 people, which is a low bar to clear. "Isolated" means the furthest from another "city" of 100,00 or more people. When you find out which city it is, you will understand why so many people want to live there. -via Digg