- Racehorse Landslide Fossil Beds- big rockfall; trail is brushed out (nwgeology.wordpress.com)
George Mustoe (WWU Geology Department) visited the famous Chuckanut fossils in the Racehorse Fossil Beds a few days ago. He sends a report on trail access. (If you aren’t familiar with this place up the Nooksack east of Bellingham, this is the site of the 2009 landslide that exposed the 11-inch-wide foot prints of the 300 pound, 7-foot-tall flightless bird Diatryma, and a host of other animal tracks and plant fossils from the 55-million-year-old Chuckanut Formation. Directions follow George’s trail report. There are many reports on this website about the fossils and the landslide.
- Trifid Nebula (Wikipedia)
The Trifid Nebula (catalogued as Messier 20 or M20 and as NGC 6514) is an H II region in the north-west of Sagittarius in a star-forming region in the Milky Way’s Scutum–Centaurus Arm. It was discovered by Charles Messier on June 5, 1764. Its name means ’three-lobe’. The object is an unusual combination of an open cluster of stars, an emission nebula (the relatively dense, reddish-pink portion), a reflection nebula (the mainly NNE blue portion), and a dark nebula (the apparent ‘gaps’ in the former that cause the trifurcated appearance, also designated Barnard 85). Viewed through a small telescope, the Trifid Nebula is a bright and peculiar object, and is thus a perennial favorite of amateur astronomers.