COVER N.197 - POLAND

Postmark: Gdansk 50 - ZA - 28.12.2022

Posted on the 28 December; Received on the 10th January 2023
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No less than three covers on my letterbox from Poland on the same day. All quite interesting and careful composed as it is the norm with members of the London Cover Circuit Club.

Roman, and in general all the other members of the club who kindly include me in their circuits, always does his best to ensure that the stamps he uses when sending me a cover are in line with my particular interests.

This is something that I really appreciate even though I, most times, have a hard time reciprocating because finding stamps at the post office these days is not an easy task.

In fact, most post offices don't even have  a selection of stamps and rely on self-adhesive definitives, if you're lucky, if not, you'll get a printed label with nothing but a couple of codes a date/time and the value of the tariff, and that's it.

One can always order from the philatelic service, but even that is not a very practical modus operandi since, at least in Portugal, you can only order full sets and not, say, 10 of X, plus 5 of Y and 6 of Z. Plus, it of course takes some time between ordering and receiving the order, so many are the times when I find I should have used a different stamp on a particular cover, but could not, due to pragmatic reasons.

Anyway, the year has passed, my stamp stock is low and I see that the first issue for 2023 will only come out on the 23rd February, so I'll have to make do with what I have at hand in the stock book.

 Against the backgrounds of this state of affairs, always receiving covers careful stamped with my particular interests in mind is nothing short of elating and another measure of how kind and generous people can be. Thanks a lot Roman!

Stamps., left to right:

Crocus, the Saffron flower, is the star of the 20 grosz stamp issued on 06JUL2016 as part of a long running definitive series dedicated to flowers and fruits.

As a matter of curiosity, I had recently received another crocus stamp on a postcard, this time from Belgium.

Incidentally, the flowers and fruits series had five more stamps issued on 2016, these illustrated with a coneflower, a poppy, a lilly, an iris and cranberries.

Poland in Space, is the unifying theme for the four 3,90 Zloty stamps issued on a minisheet on 06DEC2022, of which two can be seen on this cover.

The stamp on the left depicts one of the BRITE satellites launched by Poland.

The  Space Research Center/ Polish Academy of Sciences teamed up with the University of Vienna, FFG/ALR (Austria's Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) under BRITE (BRIght-star Target Explorer) to launch a constellation of six nano-satellites.

The objective of the programme once the constellation of nanosatelittes is fully operational  is to provide milli-magnitude (0.1% error) differential photometry of bright stars. I'll refer you to the project's information os a website maintained by the European Space Agency, since it really is rocket science to me :-)

The two Polish satellites, (nicknamed "Lem" after the late Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem and Heweliusz) were launched,respectively, on November 21, 2013  on a Dnepr-1 vehicle from the Yasny Cosmodrome in Russia and on August 19, 2014 on a Chinese Long March-4B vehicle  from TSLC (Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center), China.

The subject of the second stamp is ESA's OPS-SAT, which according to the Agency itself , being a flying laboratory has the "sole purpose of testing and validating new techniques in mission control and on-board satellite systems".

Of note is also the fact that in order to achieve its mission, the satellite being "only 30cm high, it contains an experimental computer ten times more powerful than any current ESA spacecraft."

Poland was one of the four countries from which originated the members of  the consortium that built OPS-SAT, the others being Austria, Germany and Denmark.

The Postmark, as usual in Roman's letters indicates that the cover was mailed from Gdansk.