clockwise around the Baltic Sea
- World Report 2024: Poland (hrw.org)
A new coalition government came to power in December following national elections in October, offering the prospect of improvement regarding the rule of law, women’s rights, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.
- Star Tales - Lynx (ianridpath.com)
Johannes Hevelius, the Polish astronomer who introduced this constellation in his star catalogue of 1687, continued to measure star positions with the naked eye long after other astronomers had adopted telescopic sights. The French astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) wrote in 1644 that Hevelius had the ‘eyes of a lynx’ and this constellation can be seen as an attempt to demonstrate that.[note] Indeed, Hevelius wrote in the Introduction to his catalogue that anyone who wanted to observe it would need the eyesight of a lynx (‘oculos habeat Lynceos’), although he undoubtedly exaggerated the faintness of the 19 stars he catalogued in it, typically by a full magnitude.
- Poland (Wikipedia)
Poland (Polish: Polska [ˈpɔlska]), officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, while its longest river is the Vistula. Poland has a temperate transitional climate and is the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union, with its sixteen voivodeships having a total population of over 38 million and covering a combined area of 312,696 km2 (120,733 sq mi). It is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west. The nation’s capital and largest metropolis is Warsaw. Other major cities include Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań, and Gdańsk.