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The Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21) is a relatively young neutron star. The star is the central star in the Crab Nebula, a remnant of the supernova SN 1054, which was widely observed on Earth in the year 1054. Discovered in 1968, the pulsar was the first to be connected with a supernova remnant. The Crab…

Bassekou Kouyaté (born 1966) is a musician from Mali. His band is known as Ngoni ba. He was born in Garana, Barouéli Cercle, 60 kilometres from Ségou in 1966. At the age of 12, he started playing the ngoni. In the late 1980s he moved to the capital Bamako. Kouyaté’s debut album Segu Blue was released…

Rahsaan Roland Kirk (August 7, 1935 – December 5, 1977) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, and many other instruments. He was renowned for his onstage vitality, during which virtuoso improvisation was accompanied by comic banter, political ranting, and the ability to play several instruments simultaneously. Kirk was born Ronald Theodore…

Idrees Sulieman (August 7, 1923 – July 23, 2002, both in St. Petersburg, Florida) was a bop and hard bop trumpeter. He was born Leonard Graham on 7 August 1923, later changing his name to Idrees Sulieman after converting to Islam. He studied at the Boston Conservatory, and gained early experience playing with the Carolina…

IC 2497 is a spiral galaxy close to the intergalactic cloud Hanny’s Voorwerp. IC 2497 is a former quasar, whose light lit up Hanny’s Voorwerp, which is now a light echo of that extinct quasar. It is about 45,000–70,000 light-years (14,000–21,000 pc) away from Hanny’s Voorwerp. The quasar shut down sometime in the last 70,000 years….

Charles Edward Haden (August 6, 1937 – July 11, 2014) was an American jazz double bass player, bandleader, composer and educator whose career spanned more than fifty years. In the late 1950s, Haden was an original member of the ground-breaking Ornette Coleman Quartet. Haden revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz. German musicologist Joachim-Ernst…

Anna Marie Wooldridge (August 6, 1930 – August 14, 2010), known by her stage name Abbey Lincoln, was an American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress, who wrote and performed her own compositions. She was a civil rights advocate and activist from the 1960s on. Lincoln made a career not only out of delivering deeply felt…