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The Importance of Being Earnest is a drawing-room comedy by Oscar Wilde. Premiered on 14 February 1895 in London, it depicts the affairs of two young men about town who lead double lives to evade unwanted social obligations, both assuming the name Ernest to woo two young women. Other characters are the formidable Lady Bracknell, the fussy governess Miss Prism and the benign and scholarly Canon Chasuble. The play, celebrated for its wit and repartee, parodies contemporary dramatic norms and comically satirises late-Victorian manners. The triumphant opening night was followed within weeks by Wilde's downfall and imprisonment for homosexual acts and the closure of the production, and Wilde wrote no more comic or dramatic works. From the early 20th century onwards, the play has been revived frequently and adapted for radio, television, film, operas and musicals. (Full article...)
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The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects. The target object, Dimorphos, is a 160-meter-long (525-foot) minor-planet moon of the asteroid Didymos. DART was launched on 24 November 2021 and successfully collided with Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 while about 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) from Earth. The collision shortened Dimorphos's orbit by 32 minutes and was mostly achieved by the momentum transfer associated with the recoil of the ejected debris, which was larger than the impact. This video is a timelapse of DART's final five and a half minutes before impacting Dimorphos, and was compiled from photographs captured by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO), the spacecraft's 20-centimeter-aperture (7.9-inch) camera, and transmitted to Earth in real time. The replay is ten times faster than reality, except for the last six images, which are shown at the same rate at which the spacecraft returned them. Both Didymos and Dimorphos are visible at the start of the video, and the final frame shows a patch of Dimorphos's surface 16 meters (51 feet) across. DART's impact occurred during transmission of the final image, resulting in a partial frame. Video credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins APL Recently featured: Finding in the Temple – Wait for Me, Daddy – Red-lored whistler
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November 24: Feast day of the Vietnamese Martyrs (Catholicism)
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