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She was a Liverpudlian life model who posed for thousands of artists, including Lucian Freud, who described her as an exotic creature with a deep penetrating mind, and John Lennon who, as an art student in his pre-Beatles days, asked if it would be all right to draw her.

June Furlong befriended many of those artists and, just months before her death last year, she was understood to have donated artworks that she acquired over the years to a public museum in the Wirral.

Now a row has erupted over the legal ownership of her collection. Artists who knew her are outraged that many of the paintings, prints and drawings that she had earmarked for the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, were instead sold by Hansons Auctioneers in Staffordshire in December last year.

Artist Charles Thomson spoke of his fury as he had helped to organise her charitable donation: It is absolutely outrageous that June Furlong gave her art collection to a museum and now important work has been sold off The work was [consigned to] auction, even before she had been buried on 8 December. There were 55 works. One lot of five [Frank] Auerbach prints of female nudes raised 26,000 hammer price. The total for the auction exceeded 42,000.

Furlong died in November last year, aged 90. Over six decades, she had posed for artists, going to the studios of Francis Bacon and Auerbach, among others. She had been a longtime model for the Liverpool School of Art, where she knew Lennon, who was fascinated that I knew all the big names in English art, she once recalled. She also modelled in London, at the Slade, Central St Martins College and the Royal College of Art.

But she disliked being described as a nude model, once saying: Nudity has such sleazy connotations It gives completely the wrong impression of the art world I was involved in.

Furlong was a long-term companion of the artist George Wallace Jardine, the surrealist painter who tutored Lennon on occasion, and her donation included many of his pictures.

Thomson said that Furlong had not just signed a gift document, but had written a message, confirming her wishes for the Williamson. On 7 December, he had enclosed that document - whose original is held by the Williamson - in an email to the auctioneer, Charles Hanson, known from his appearances on the BBCs Bargain Hunt, among other programmes.

He wrote: I have spoken to the Williamson who have confirmed that the work entered into your auction this week from June Furlongs house is their property and has been since June this year, when she gifted it to them with the proviso that she could keep in her house during her lifetime such works as she wished. This was effectively a loan from the Williamson to her.

Thomson is calling for legal action to be taken by Wirral Council, which funds the Williamson, either to retrieve the auctioned works or to ensure all proceeds go to the gallery.

But whether that document is legally binding remains to be seen. Furlongs cousin, Roy Corlett, confirmed he was aware of the pictures transfer to Hansons and that he was the next of kin, among other family members.

He said: There isnt an executor at the moment because theres no will I think this matter will be sorted out between two lots of solicitors, those representing Junes estate and those who represent the council.

Asked whether Furlong had signed the gift document, he said: Thats a matter for solicitors to decide.

Colin Simpson, curator of the Williamson and principal museums officer for Wirral council, said: The council and the executors are taking legal advice in relation to the ownership of the collection.

On the Williamsons website, he pays tribute to Furlong as an iconic figure in the Liverpool art scene.

Thomson said: I tried to stop the auction in order to save the work for the Williamson collection, but could not do so. Only Wirral council could have done this and they didnt.

Once the auction was going ahead anyway, I bid successfully for several paintings by Jardine for my own collection, which is scheduled for a charitable art foundation and museum I am planning I would support any action to retrieve for the Williamson all the work from Junes collection sold at the auction or else all the money raised from the sale.

Bob Williams, a retired Liverpool gallery owner who was a contemporary of Furlong, Jardine and Lennon at the Liverpool School, said: The wishes of June Furlong should be carried out for her art collection to be in the Williamson. Sir Nicholas Serota, chairman of Arts Council England, confirmed to the Observer that his team was looking into the questions that [Thomson] has raised.

Hanson declined to comment.

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Freud's muse ignored? Row breaks out over sale of June Furlong's art collection - The Guardian

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (in its eXtreme version) is the deepest view of the universe yet obtained and will be, until JADES takes over. It stretches approximately 13 billion light-years and includes approximately 10,000 galaxies. It took 11.3 days for the Hubble Space Telescope to collect these ancient photons. Try downloading the largest version and zoom in on different sections. Were seeing these galaxies as they were billions of years ago. How might they look today? Image via NASA/ ESA/ S. Beckwith (STSci)/ HUDF team.

Astronomers announced a new deeper-than-ever sky survey this month (January 15, 2021), to be conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble telescopes successor, scheduled for launch in October of this year. The new survey is abbreviated JADES, which is short for James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. The survey will be like the Hubble Deep Fields, but deeper still. Its main goal is to see far away in space and thus far back into the very young universe and image it just at the end of the so-called Cosmic Dark Ages, that is, at the time when gas in the universe went from being opaque to transparent. This is also the time when the very first stars were forming very large, massive and bright stars in a veritable firestorm of star birth when the young universe was less than 5% of its current age.

The 2021 lunar calendars are here. Order yours before theyre gone!

The Webb telescope will be located near the second Lagrange point a relatively stable region of space, gravitationally speaking, known as L2 some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. To conduct the new survey, the Webb telescope will be staring at a small point of space for nearly 800 hours (approximately 33 days) to be able to see fainter objects than those ever seen before and thus to find the first generation of galaxies. Astronomers want to know, among other things, how fast did these galaxies form, and how fast did their stars form? They also want to look for the very first supermassive black holes, which are thought to lie at the hearts of nearly all large galaxies, including our Milky Way.

The long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been postponed a number of times for a variety of reasons, most recently because of effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the formal successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, but is equipped with instrumentation able to image further into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum than Hubble could.

This capability also makes it a worthy successor to the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope which recently went into retirement.

What makes the infrared part of the spectrum so important for surveys like JADES? If you look really deep, you will also look back in time, and the farther back in time you look, the more redshifted the galaxies are (the farther away they are, the faster they move away from us, and the more their light has been shifted towards the red part of the spectrum). This means that the light we want to observe, originally in the optical (visible) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, might not even show much in the optical part anymore. Instead, its been shifted to longer wavelengths, into the infrared regime.

In other words, the use of infrared cameras is necessary to be able to see the light from the first generation of galaxies. Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said:

Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years. Were trying to investigate those early periods. We must do this with an infrared-optimized telescope because the expansion of the universe causes light to increase in wavelength as it traverses the vast distance to reach us. So even though the stars are emitting light primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, that light is shifted quite relentlessly out into the infrared. Only Webb can get to the depth and sensitivity thats needed to study these early galaxies.

In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope was built specifically for this purpose. Up to now, infrared images are much less resolved less clear than optical images, because of their longer wavelength. With its much larger collecting area, the Webb will be able to image, in infrared, at the same resolution detail that Hubble could obtain in the optical part of the spectrum.

Get ready for a whole new set of mind-blowing images of the universe, this time in the infrared, from Webb!

After having successfully deployed its solar panels precisely as its supposed to do once its in space the Webb telescope is shown here ready for the final tests on December 17, 2020, at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center. Then it will be packed up and transported to French Guyana, to be launched on October 31, 2021, via an Ariane V rocket. Image via NASA/ Chris Gunn.

The use of deep field surveys is a young science, for two reasons. First, astronomers didnt have the right instrumentation before Hubble to do them. Second, its also because no one initially knew the result of staring into a piece of empty space for a long time. Such a long stare into the unknown would require valuable observation time, and if this long observation didnt produce any results, it would be considered a waste.

But in 1995, Robert Williams, then the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), which administrates the Hubble telescope, decided to use his directors discretionary time to point the Hubble toward a very small and absolutely empty-looking part of the sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major the Great Bear. There were no stars visible from our Milky Way (or extremely few), no nearby galaxies visible in the field, and no visible gas clouds. Hubble collected photons for 10 consecutive days, and the result, the Hubble Deep Field, was a success and a paradigm changer: A patch of sky about as small as the eye of George Washington on an American quarter (25-cent coin) held out at arms length, showed a 10 billion-light-years-long tunnel back in time with a plethora of galaxies around 3,000 of them at different evolutionary stages along the way. The field of observational cosmology was born.

This was done again in 1998 with the Hubble telescope pointed to the southern sky (Hubble Deep Field South), and the result was the same. Thus we learned that the universe is uniform over large scales.

Next was the installation of a new, powerful camera on Hubble (the Advanced Camera for Surveys) in 2002. The incredible Hubble Ultra Deep Field was acquired in 2004, in a similarly small patch of sky near the constellation Orion, about 1/10 of a full moon diameter (2.4 x 3.4 arc minutes, in contrast to the original Hubble Deep Fields north and south, which were 2.6 x 2.6 arc minutes). And so our reach was extended even deeper into space, and even further back in time, showing light from 10 thousand galaxies along a 13-billion-light-years-long tunnel of space. If youll remember that the universe is about 13.77 billion years old, youll see this is getting us really close to the beginning!

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was the most sensitive astronomical image ever made at wavelengths of visible (optical) light until 2012, when an even more refined version was released, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, which reached even farther: 13.2 billion years back in time.

The JADES survey will be observed in two batches, one on the northern sky and one on the southern in two famous fields called GOODS North and South (abbreviated from Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey).

Marcia Rieke, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona who co-leads the JADES Team with Pierre Ferruit of the European Space Agency (ESA), explained:

We chose these fields because they have such a great wealth of supporting information. Theyve been studied at many other wavelengths, so they were the logical ones to do.

View larger. | Look closely. Every single speck of light in this image is a distant galaxy (except for the very few ones with spikes which are foreground stars). This telescopic field of view is part of the GOODS South field. Its one of the directions in space thatll be observed in JADES, a new survey that aims to study the very first galaxies to appear in the infancy of the universe. Image via NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope/ James Webb Space Telescope site.

The GOODS fields have been observed with several of the most famous telescopes, covering a great wavelength range from infrared through optical to X-ray. They are not fully as deep (the observations dont reach as far back) as the Ultra Deep Field, but cover a larger area of the sky (4-5 times larger) and are the most data-rich areas of the sky in terms of depth combined with wavelength coverage. By the way, the first deep field, HDF-N, is located in the GOODS north image, and the Ultra deep field/eXtreme (dont you love these names?) is located in the GOODS south field.

There are a large number of ambitious science goals for the JADES program pertaining to the composition of the first galaxies, including the first generation of supermassive black holes. How these came about at such an early time is a mystery. As well, the transition of gas from neutral and opaque to transparent and ionized, something astronomers call the epoch of reionization, is not well understood. JADES team member Andrew Bunker, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who is also part of the ESA team behind the Webb telescope, said:

This transition is a fundamental phase change in the nature of the universe. We want to understand what caused it. It could be that its the light from very early galaxies and the first burst of star formation It is kind of one of the Holy Grails, to find the so-called Population III stars that formed from the hydrogen and helium of the Big Bang.

People have been trying to do this for many decades and results have been inconclusive so far.

But, hopefully, not for much longer!

Bottom line: JADES is an ambitious new deep sky survey to be observed with the James Webb Space Telescope, once launched. It will reach further back in time and space than any survey before, to study the very first generation of galaxies after the universe transitioned from opaque to transparent.

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JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields - EarthSky

The leader of Sinn Fin has advocated once again for an all-island approach to suppressing the transmission of COVID-19 north and south of the Irish Border.

Mary Lou McDonald said the party has been pressing the Irish government, as well as the power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland, about the measure but to no avail.

It comes as the country has passed 100,000 cases of the virus this month,more than all of 2020 combined.

Meanwhile, there have been a total 103,960 positive cases of coronavirus reported in the North to date after a further 426 were confirmed today.

Speaking to On The Record with Gavan Reilly, Ms McDonald said she remains hopeful that a consensus can be reached between the two Governments on an all-Ireland approach to the virus.

She said: "You don't have to be an expert epidemiologist to realise to keep any of us safe, you keep all of us safe, and we have a strategic advantage living on an island."

The Sinn Fin leader said the party had faced particular resistance from unionist politicians in the North who wanted to adhere to guidance from Britain.

Earlier this week, DUP MP Sammy Wilson told Newstalk that an all-island approach to international travel is not acceptable practically or politically, with restrictions between Northern Ireland and Britain unacceptable.

"We have faced a very considerable challenge when some colleagues form unionism have looked to London to take their lead from Boris Johnson, who initially was adopting a very laissez-faire herd immunity approach which would have proved catastrophic for all of us," she said.

McDonald: 'Mind-boggling' there isn't an all-island approach to COVID-19

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She added that calls for cross border tracking and tracing, "unfortunately didn't happen", but "worse than that", where there was a move to share data on international travel, "the [Irish] Government here resisted that for reasons I can't understand".

"I find that quite mind-boggling," Ms McDonald stated.

"If you look to, for example, Scotland, and what the Scots have done, and they live on the island of Britain, they have been very clear that the assessment that is made on the basis of public health and public health only, and measures that are necessary to protect people's health will be taken."

She is hopeful that given the high levels of community transmission and the prevalence of new variants from the UK, South Africa and Brazil will "refocus and reshape the political conversation" about an all-Ireland approach.

Sinn Fin are not trying to engage in "oneupmanship " or add politics to the issue other than keeping people safe, she said.

Ms McDonald acknowledged that there has been a convergence of public health restrictions north and south of the Border, with measures in place in both regions until March 5th.

She also added that solving international travel onto the island of Ireland "isn't the silver bullet that's going to sort everything out".

"All of the political obstacles and dilemmas are self-evident in this scenario," she stated.

"But I think it should also be self-evident that in the absence of real political drive and will, what you get is a state of inertia and what you get, which is what we have seen, is months of a memorandum of understanding that really opened up a door for joint action and to demonstrate success, but that wasn't grabbed and wasn't pursed."

Ms McDonald added there shouldn't be a "tit for tat" response from the UK after a row over Article 16 on Friday.

The North's First Minister Arlene Foster said yesterday that the British Prime Minister should use the emergency clause, which is part of the Brexit deal.

It comes after the European Commission planned to use it to stop COVID-19 vaccines leaving the jurisdiction, plans that were scrapped after strong criticism.

The EU "blindsided" member states by attempting to impose controls on vaccines being exported to Northern Ireland, the Taoiseach Michel Martin said today.

Ms McDonald said Friday's events were a "grave error" and a "mistake that was compounded by the fact that nobody was made aware that this was the thinking of the Commission".

This includes chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, Dublin or London, which caused a level of "deep concern and annoyance", she stated.

"The whole Brexit deal has been framed by an understanding by most of us and an acknowledgement that there never any good Brexit and it was going to bring real and enduring damage, not least to Ireland.

"The Protocol was secured over a very protected period of time just to afford some basic protections for the island of Ireland as a whole."

If the deal has been made in a more orderly and organised fashion, it would have given everyone concerned time to prepare, but that's not what happened, she added.

Ms McDonald said that while the events on Friday "took everybody by surprise", she was relieved that the EU Commission back away from the proposed triggering of Article 16.

"To those who are now saying the British Prime Minister should reciprocate, should enter into a kind of tit for tat triggering of Article 16, that would be absolutely irresponsible and should not be countenanced," she warned.

"Those who are making that call need to give their heads a shake a reconsider their position.

She confirmed that this includes Arlene Foster.

The Sinn Fin leader believes a "frank discussion" needs to be had with the Commission "to remind everyone of the purpose of the Protocol and to ensure we don't have a repeat performance of what was unfolding on Friday night".

Such a level of "common understanding" is needed to give a sense of "stability" and "no drama", she added.

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McDonald: 'Mind-boggling' there isn't an all-island approach to COVID-19 - Newstalk