COVER N. 647 - SRI LANKA

Postmark: Headquarters P. O. Colombo Mail 10.10.2025  

Posted on the 10th October;  Received on the 22nd October 2025

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Ravi kindly sends me pieces of sky.... and I, for one, unlike Astérix, am not afraid that the sky will fall on my head... Bohoma Sthuthi, Ravi!

"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself", thus spoke Carl Sagan, in the book that literally opened up (even if just slightly, for such is its dimension) the universe to a lot of us, me included, the curious kid who would not fail to watch the week's episode of "Cosmos" on TV.

At the time, the 80s of last century, when instead of typing www, you'd flip a page with the tip of your index finger,  National Geographic was also publishing covers with never before seen details of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, taken by those wonderful pieces of mankind named Voyager 1 and 2.

And what a discovery that was....who could ever forget the first shots of Jupiter's eye, that big red spot in the planet's atmosphere, for instance?  I pity I could never show them to my grandfather. Maybe like that I could try to convince him that yes, Man had walked on the moon, something he had most serious doubts about....

Today, images like those have become almost common place, such were the developments in technology of the last decades that have made it possible to photograph the solar system and beyond with a level of detail that is hard to imagine (who would have thought that it would be possible to photograph a black hole ????)

And yet, every time I look at one of those images I feel humbled, reduced in existence, as if dissolved in some cosmic fluid, the same fluid that binds us, the entire universe, together.

Yes, the cosmos is within me; yes, I am star stuff... we all are!

... Although, due to our transient nature, that stuff is more of the "shooting"  type than of the "wandering" category....

On 25SEP2025, Sri Lanka Post issued a minisheet comprising 10 x 50 Rupee circular stamps, entitled, "The wonders of the Universe", featuring many of the outstanding photographs of celestial bodies  that at some point have awed us in their uncommonness and beauty.

Four of  these stamps can be seen on this cover, illustrated (left to right) with marvellous photographs of  the colourful rings of Saturn; The great red spot on Jupiter, the Open star cluster of the Pleiades, and the Orion Nebula. 

As usual with Ravi's mail, the cover is postmarked from Colombo's Main P.O.