From =BBC News Devon Van Houten Maldonado - Features correspondent Edited by Amal Udawatta Museo Nacional de Arte de Mexico The colour survives in the work of 17th Century Spanish colonial painters, a symbol of the wealth that ultimately doomed the Maya, writes Devon Van Houten Maldonado. In 17th Century Europe, when Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens painted their famous masterworks, ultramarine blue pigment made from the semi-precious lapis lazuli stone was mined far away in Afghanistan and cost more than its weight in gold. Only the most illustrious painters were allowed to use the costly material, while lesser artists were forced to use duller colours that faded under the sun. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the 19th Century that a synthetic alternative was invented, and true ultramarine blue finally became widely available. During colonisation Maya blue was exploited along with everything else that had belonged to the peop
From - Sky & Telescope By - Camille Carlisle Edited by - Amal Udawatta Using Hubble Space Telescope data spanning approximately 90 days (between December 2023 and March 2024) when the giant planet Jupiter was approximately 740 million kilometres from the Sun, astronomers measured the Great Red Spot’s size, shape, brightness, colour, and vorticity over a full oscillation cycle. The data reveal that the Great Red Spot is not as stable as it might look. It was observed going through an oscillation in its elliptical shape, jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The cause of the 90-day oscillation is unknown. The observation is part of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program (OPAL). NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC) (The Great Red Spot doesn’t move in lockstep with the atmosphere around it. It slowly drifts westward, rolling like a ball between the surrounding bands of alternating winds. It laps the planet over the course of a few years.) But the storm doesn’t drift at a constant rate. Astrono