Early this morning before the temperature had risen above freezing, the local pair of red-shouldered hawks (Buteo lineatus) had perched together for a few minutes in the backyard, immediately after the female had taken unsuccessful shots at two possible meals, one of them an unidentified bird. We rarely see them together, and so far never as close as this, though we know they’re remaining together – again, not 100% sure they’re a mated pair and not simply siblings, but it seems pretty likely at this point, and we’ll be watching for a nest within the next two months. Due to the size disparity, it is likely the female on the left, and she’s the one that usually hunts in the yard, but as you can see, differentiating them by markings is next to impossible.
As you can also see, once spring comes and the trees leaf out, their visibility is going to become much worse – we’re certainly not going to have this view right out the back door, so I’m happy to take advantage of it now. At the same time, they’re so used to our presence now that they won’t spook unless we get within 10-15 meters, which is a help. Meanwhile, the great blue heron that visits the pond takes off at first sight of us, regardless of the distance, and the mallards are only slightly more tolerant. I’ve seen both species being way more accepting of human presence than this, so perhaps it’s just a matter of conditioning. We’ll see what we can do…
It’s funny – I finally sat down yesterday to clear out the burgeoning Sort folder of new images, slotting them into their respectful spots (which includes the trash bin,) and less than 24 hours later, that folder is already up to 71 images. Some of those you’ve already seen, since the occultation photos came in there, but some will show up on Friday.
For now, we have a handful that I rediscovered while sorting and set aside to feature as curiosities. Like this one of the cedar waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) that had gathered a few days back:
As I remarked then, cedar waxwings have some of the best coloration, but this view of the chin showed something unexpected: a sharp black point, kind of an underside widow’s peak, right under the chin. I thought, What a cool marking!, but other images showed that it isn’t actually present – it’s only the shadow of the bird’s own beak. Oh well.
But while here, we see another frame of the same bird feeding.
Grasping one of the little indigo berries that the small flock was feeding upon, this one looked right into the camera, or at least appears to, perhaps showing off its meal smugly (or not.) I could have had a few like this, were it not for all the intervening branches that also tended to grab autofocus, but at least here there’s the faintest hint of the deep brown color of the eyes. And it gives an idea of how many images got tossed because of those branches.
After sorting, I also did a tally of the images obtained for 2024, which is below.
Aquatic: 34
Arthropods: 652
Beach: 0 (I think I lamented this earlier)
Birds: 2,458
Invertebrates: 2
Lakes/Streams/Waterfalls: 1,127
Leaves/Plants/Trees: 459
Mammals: 107
Mountain: 35 (I thought this would be lower, but I forgot I went to Tennessee to pick up my brother)
Reptiles/Amphibians: 768
Scenic/Abstract: 332
Science/Miscellaneous: 586
Space: 270 (well, if we count those taken in space, that number is 0)
Sunrise/Sunset: 156
That totals 6,986 – mind you, those are the keepers, so not an accurate tally of how many I actually took, but it’s still lower than other years. Some of them got into multiple categories as well, so reduce by 5-10% if you’re interested in the actual number of distinct images. Oh, you’re not?
But doing this, I found that the first bird images of 2024 were an unexpected subject, a bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) visiting the neighborhood pond.
That’s the first, the ‘insurance frame’ taken as it came into sight, in case the bird spooked before I got close enough for better ones, which happens from time to time. It’s full-frame as well, but crops down halfway decently:
The tangle of branches gives entirely the wrong impression, since the eagle was at the edge of the pond with a clear view and a clear flight path. I just liked the idea that the first bird was not only an eagle, but one I wouldn’t have expected to find until going down to Jordan Lake, some kilometers south. This was taken January 24th, and I’ve got that beat this year, since my first bird pics were on the 2nd, but admittedly those are only mallards. The eagle, meanwhile, visited several times over the following couple of weeks, but seems to have vanished at the same time that the red-shouldered hawks began their pre-mating territorial displays, so there’s a distinct possibility that they chased it off.
And finally,
I realized during sorting that this one had a little snide commentary, as a small flock of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) took flight in the thick fog a few weeks back, while another sits complacently alongside a sign indicating its cowardice. Or something. That whole flock ran straight into the masts of the sailboats moored about fifty meters away*, so the joke’s on them, eh?
But that’s it for sorting finds, until the next, which typically comes over a thousand images off, since that’s how I parcel out my time: put on some podcasts and just plod through the folder. I could do it daily, but then how would I catch up on podcasts, huh? Okay, then.
So I did indeed get out to view the occultation of Mars by the mean ol’ moon (ours, I mean, not any of the other planets’,) and even snagged a couple of video clips. The nice thing was, Mars was bright enough to be seen near the moon with only a slight overexposure of the moon itself, so that worked out acceptably well.
You can see it easily down there at the bottom, and also that the moon isn’t quite full, but close enough for our purposes (well, any phase would be fine for our purposes, and even a crescent might have looked cool.) This was with the Tamron 150-600 at 600mm of course, which we can zoom in on to see at full resolution.
Video resolution would be different, though, so I switched over to using the 2X teleconverter with the lens – this reduces light by two stops, but this was easily compensated with aperture and ISO.
You can actually make out some striations on Mars now, though I’m not 100% sure this isn’t atmospherics and lens aberrations – one of my frames appears to show the polar cap, while others don’t, and there was evidence of increasing high-altitude humidity.
Now, I did get the telescope out, and temperature-stabilized and collimated and everything, but it was close to a waste of time: the camera mount that I had for it wouldn’t work with the objective standoff, and I couldn’t achieve focus – the sensor was too far away from the focal point. During the occultation, I amused myself with looking at some details on the moon and even a bit of the nebulae around Orion’s dagger, but that was about it, and couldn’t do a thing about getting images. I have a webcam adaptation that I need to get working, so there’s that project.
But, I did shoot video with the long lens and teleconverter, at least:
As mentioned within, Stellarium’s plotting of the times seems to be slightly off; I’ve noticed this before, so naturally on the reappearance I started early to capture the right moment, but this meant that the moon was moving out of the frame during the reemergence, leading to my little screwup. Not that big a deal, since the resolution was still too low for a nice look anyway, not to mention those cirrus clouds reducing the visibility.
[A note about the motion: what you’re seeing is mostly the rotation of the Earth, causing both the moon and Mars to slide across the sky. But the moon itself is revolving around the Earth in the opposite direction, quite slowly in comparison since it takes 28 days to do a full orbit. This means that everything appears to be moving to the upper right (for this time of night and perspective, anyway,) but the moon still blots out Mars in the opposite direction, or Mars slides behind the moon as it overtakes it, whatever you like. It’s the same with eclipses. Seems odd, but most of the apparent motion is just the Earth turning.]
The same full-resolution view of Mars after it reappeared looks much worse now due to atmospheric distortion:
I did several frames, tweaking focus in between, but this was the clearest that I achieved. It did not help that the moon was significantly higher now and required an awkward position to see through the viewfinder, and I was viewing through glasses that weren’t flat to the eyepiece. I should have dug out the right-angle viewfinder attachment.
Overall, though, it was successful, just not as close or resolved as I would have liked. Still working on it.
Tomorrow night, a little after 9 PM EST (so 2 AM Jan 14 UTC – adjust as necessary,) the moon will occult Mars, pretty directly for most of the US. This will last for a little over an hour before Mars reappears again out the other side, so this is an easy thing to spot by naked eye, and a good target for telephoto lenses, small and large telescopes.
Plot of Mars occultation by moon from Stellarium for this location – other regions will vary somewhat I keep making noises to this effect, and keep not doing it, but I really should get the telescope set up for this – it’s a good, easy target and we even have conditions tonight for a test run. It’s cold out there, and the scope is always a bitch to set up, align, collimate, and all that – I understand why people build backyard observatories. And ideally, I should have the tracking motor working, but last year’s attempts to get this together for the solar eclipse produced almost nothing – it seemed to be working, but not properly, and I had no way of determining why not. In this case however, the target area will be broad enough that tracking may be unnecessary.
The big caveat: the moon is a hell of a lot brighter than Mars, and so an exposure to get good detail from both isn’t happening, but if you’re into astrophotography, you’re probably used to Photoshopping (I think they call it “image stacking,” but potato/potato) to get an image that shows both, so have at it. I may do some experiments tonight to see what relative exposures are necessary. The moon is easy, but we can bleach that out a bit to capture Mars as it hides.
If you haven’t done it yet, download Stellarium, and get it set for your location. It’s really damn handy. And good luck!
It’s January, it’s cold, everyone (in the northern hemisphere) is cooped up inside, and to top it all off, we’re back with the tag roundup – death and tags, you can’t escape them. And while you think you know what tags are and what they’re for, here on the ol’ Walkabout blogaroonie, they’re also irreverent and uncouth comments on the content, and since both the content and the snark are all ours, this says something that a therapist could probably have a field day with.
Now, there are 7,890 tags on the blog now, and a whopping 5,125 of them have been used only once, which is disturbing even to us – we’re gonna have to spay them or something. But before that happens, we’ll examine a few of the more… um… we’ll examine a few of them.
ha ha ha urk! – We’re attracted to bright colors – there’s something hinky going on
are nature photography groupies a thing? – One can hope, but I think accountants stand a better chance. A shameless method of linking to some photos, though, one of which immediately became the backs to the Gnomon Deck, which wasn’t ultimately my decision – I’d forwarded something like 26 options for that…
potato-nosed ghost of Shouerst Hall – As well as, “but what’s that behind him?” and “MetamucAl.” One of several holidays that will appear, but this one had me befuddled for a short while, because I knew that Shouerst Hall was probably a pun though I couldn’t immediately place it. Just had to sound it out properly
Paranoia cannot die – As well as, “Chaos was attending.” An oldie but a… an oldie, anyway
oh he’s just yakkin’ on a bone – Points if you can name the movie. That the tag’s from, I mean – I don’t think they’ve made a movie about the post, though the income probably wouldn’t change…
boys will be boys – Followed by, “toys will be destroyed.” Even older. I spoke with my brother not too long ago, who had similar memories
goddamn spiderwebs – It actually took a while before the tags started getting snarky, and this is one of the first, even though it’s also pretty appropriate.
And naturally, we need to look at the holidays we celebrated enthusiastically and religiously this year:
The statistics for the site for 2024 aren’t impressive at all, indicating a slow decline over several years. While the oppressive heat and being involved with the move had more than a little to do with it this year, it doesn’t explain the trend over several years (well, the heat may be a small contributing factor.) There’s also the ugly truth that we haven’t done anything more than a couple of weekend trips since 2021, and this year isn’t looking too promising either – we’ll see I guess. There was the eclipse trip last April, but let’s be real: the photo opportunities primarily lasted three minutes.
Mostly though, we kind of expect to see a peak right around where it is, because time and subjects and so on limit how many posts are actually going to appear, so there’s no expectation that these will continue to go up at least, but hovering in the same general region would be preferable.
The numbers, just for the sake of it. Post count was 221, down from 252 last year. Word count was 143,160, down from 157,163 last year, totaling 2.4 million over the life of the blog. And there were 737 images uploaded, which hasn’t been that low since 2018 – slackass. The new location may help this a lot – several new species have been spotted already, and we’re expecting spring to put on quite a show.
We’ll close with an image that’s been sitting in the blog folder for over a year now, from a trip that helped boost the numbers for 2023 right at the end of the year – redundant then, so it’s being put to use now. The sun’s coming out; maybe we’ll try for some more subjects…
The big winter storm rolled in last night, though for our region (mid NC and towards the coast) it wasn’t very impressive. A dusting of snow where we used to live (and where The Girlfriend’s Sprog presently lives,) while out our way, it was merely sleet which has changed to rain – not even photogenic enough to make for decent pics, either way. But the red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) that has been missing for a few days showed back up this morning on the spinner.
The location of the spinner, about a meter-and-a-half off the ground, is too prominent in the yard; I have to shoot through the dining room window because her perch is in plain sight of the front door, and I can’t slip out without her noticing and flying off. But at least you can see a hint of the ice on the spinner, and the hunched and fluffed pose indicating that it’s right around freezing out there. What she was hoping to find – what she’s ever been hoping to find once the temperature dips below 10°c – we’re never quite sure, but we suspect it might be the moles in the yard. She’s certainly dropped to the ground and pawed around gently several times, making us think she’s been seeing the movement of the ground or leaves, but the moles remain stubbornly under the surface. Still, she keeps returning.
She will peer around as if bored, and I know she can see me through the window so I keep my movements to a minimum, generally when she’s turned away, but occasionally her attention will be drawn by something and she’ll peer intently at the ground for a few moments. Makes me want to throw some food out for her, but their diet of reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals would necessitate a trip to the pet store, which isn’t going to happen.
As usual, I had left the white-balance on ‘Full Sunlight,’ which also means ‘As Is,’ no alteration or compensation, but I tweaked one of the frames in post to bring it more to what it appears to us (we tend to have our own internal white-balance):
Overcast skies let mostly blue light through, with a significant reduction in the others, so this required a decrease in Blue (which in RGB color space means in increase in Yellow,) and an increase in Red – still not warm-looking, especially with the low-contrast light, but not quite as frigid.
And yes, I think her weight is gradually leaning the pole over – she really does like the perch we so thoughtfully provided for her.
This week’s entry is one that I’ve been looking for, as a photo subject, for years. They’ve always passed through the areas I’ve lived in, and in fact can be found all over the US, but they tend to prefer specific conditions that I’ve never been in at the right time. But yesterday, success was to be had.
That’s a cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum,) among the coolest plumage of the birds to be found in the US, a great combination of the stark contrast of the mask colors and the airbrushed gradients of the rest of the bird, even getting a bit greenish on the rearmost undersides. Moreover, they have brilliant yellow tailtips and brilliant red tips to a handful of their wing feathers.
They’re also quite gregarious, and I first spotted some last week, congregating in a tree near the pond in a small flock of perhaps 8-10 individuals. This time, I had the camera and long lens in hand when I happened on this smaller flock, which was partaking of the dark indigo berries peeking in here. I only regretted not having the tripod along, because I would have obtained video of them feeding. They were not very far away and unconcerned with my presence, even when I dodged around a bit to reduce the number of intervening branches, but at least those were largely bare at this time of year. Full credit to the birds for appearing under clear skies and in an optimal light direction.
Their breeding areas are supposed to sit well north of here, so they will disappear shortly, perhaps even within a few days, and might not appear again until next winter – I have no baseline to work from, so we’re establishing that now I suppose. Meanwhile, I have to determine what tree it is that’s providing their food; I want to say juniper, but I have no confidence in that. Leaves would help with that ID, so it might wait a while.
The main reasons that I have so few blog posts recently have been the projects, of which there are several – some of which you may see here, but most probably not, because they’re house-related schtuff. And I should be working on some of them right now, except I’m not, because I’m dicking around.
The moon is bright out there right now, and I went out briefly to shoot a few frames, because it’s been a while. It’s in waxing gibbous phase and appears to be directly overhead; it’s not, rather at about 75°, but that’s enough to be craned over uncomfortably backward having difficulty with the long lens raised high above my head. It was adequate to snag one clear frame, however.
That’s not as sharp as I’ve managed a few times before, but it was also handheld since I didn’t feel like getting the tripod for such a short session, plus the gymnastics required to be shooting, again, close to straight up – tripods aren’t made to view those kinds of angles easily. There’s a detail therein that’s not very visible here, but shows up at full resolution and beyond.
This is not quite twice the resolution of the original image, and shows a single point of light (okay, reflection) right there at the ‘north pole’ of the moon. I was curious as to what I was seeing up there, and so I started poking around, with the help of Topographical Maps of the Moon and the Google Earth Pro program – not the online resource, though I didn’t check to see if this could be found that way, but the program has options to view the moon and Mars and such. The problems with both of these are, they don’t appear like they do in the photos you might obtain, because the first resource is a colorful illustration with more detail than you’re likely to capture, and the latter only uses photos from ‘high noon,’ as it were, which destroys the modeling and shadows of craters and geography that are visible in photos taken at any other time of lunar day.
Then there’s libration, the wobble that the moon undergoes as it revolves around the earth, so at any given moment it might be tilted from the equatorial view that maps and illustrations always provide. This means that what appears to be near the north pole of the moon may not be – it’s just the tilt of the moon. And it was in this case, placing that prominent crater in the center of the second image, which is Plato, higher up on the lunar globe than it is normally illustrated, since the pole is leaning back away from us right now. Still, after a bit of playing, I think I have things plotted reasonably well. The ridge at far left is Montes Jura, forming the edge of the old crater Sinus Iridium. The little squiggle straight up from Plato, near the edge of the darkness, is the southern wall of Goldschmidt Crater, pretty distinctively shaped, so the little point catching the light over the horizon of the moon is likely the southeastern wall of Anaxagoras Crater. This sits about 72.5° north, so still a ways from the north lunar pole (90° of course,) but again, the moon is tilted right now, so closer to ‘visible north’ than that.
Exciting, right? Yeah, but I like the challenge, a little bit of sleuthing and resource comparisons, which I could also do indoors because it’s cold. Still, you’re probably anxiously awaiting the tag roundup, so I’ll get back to that.
I went out today knowing that it was a holiday, which I could have avoided, but that would be shirking my bloggy duty, and I figured I’d just get it over with. For today is Lock Teasers Day, which is not half as much fun as the other kind.
What, exactly, is Lock Teasers Day, you ask? Which is stupid, because it’s right there in the name: it’s the day for photo subjects that hold still just long enough to achieve focus lock upon, and absolutely no longer, so they’re next to impossible to get a photo of. You’ll hear the little beep, or see the viewfinder indication that focus is now bang-on, and zoom! they’re out of the viewfinder.
In my experience, most of the time it’s little birds that do this, and in the new location we now have a variety of new (to me, anyway) species that qualify. I produced several examples today, on at least three different species, such as this:
And this:
And even this, an avian nip-slip:
… which might make you remember Blurred Bird Day, and true enough, I got a few of those too. Eventually, however, I managed to defeat their dastardly efforts.
Naturally, the bird showed it was better at this holiday than I was, since all it showed was its underside, which is inadequate for identification on, like, ninety percent of bird species. Nonetheless, I’m thinking this is a ruby-crowned kinglet (Corthylio calendula,) which I’ve seen before but never managed any good photos of. They’re a classic species for the holiday: small, hyperactive, and tending to flit around in more crowded foliage. This is where full-time manual focus comes in handier, because auto-focus naturally wants to lock onto any branches in between the bird and camera instead of the bird itself – where is AI when you might have a proper use for it, huh? But full-time manual focus means you can leave autofocus switched on but tweak it to the proper subject when it unintelligently grabs the wrong point in the frame. This works better when you can hold still enough so that the autofocus says, Oh, that! Gotcha, and not, Wait, which? It keeps moving, as you accidentally track off of the bird, easy to do with high-magnification and a heavy lens, especially if you don’t have a handy-dandy long lens support grip.
There were at least three species of woodpecker that celebrated the holiday today, though I’ve previously gotten good pics of all of them, so ha ha to you bastards. There was this downy woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens):
… which, even though it peeked out later on, made sure it was in shade and only showed its head, barely:
The other two were a red-bellied woodpecker that seemed to be disputing territory with a squirrel, of all things, but only as long as I didn’t have the camera in hand, and a northern flicker that showed only its underside as well before darting off into dense pine canopy.
There were still two more birds that observed the holiday with the enthusiasm of a nursery school teacher with a hundredweight of colored construction paper – you can’t find that kind of dedication anymore. There was this one, behaving very much like a nuthatch but clearly not either of the two species to be found here:
… who didn’t know how to play the game well, because it was skipping up the trunk of this bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) in bright sunlight, not only visible through its movement and shadow, but at the same distance as the easy-to-focus-upon trunk. Amateur. But then again, it was only providing a dorsal view, which is only slightly better than the underside, and when it went around to display a profile, it disappeared around the trunk in deep shade, so maybe not that bad after all. Eventually, it did peek out for the barest chance at a pic.
That was enough for identification: this is a brown creeper (Certhia americana,) and the first time, to my knowledge, that I’ve spotted one. The day, by the way, struggled to reach temperatures above freezing, but the birds were out in force, perhaps knowing that within 24 hours a winter storm was predicted – time to top off the calories.
One more for the holiday.
Once again acting like a nuthatch, I thought I had another example of the species above, but examination of the photos showed a few distinctive differences, and I stumbled upon the ID almost by accident, since I wasn’t looking in that particular family.
This was as good as it got, but it seems to be enough to peg this as a female black-and-white warbler (Mniotilta varia, and no, that’s not a typo,) further buttressed with the details that it acts like a nuthatch, can show buff patches on sides, and is the first to arrive in the early parts of the year. Granted, this is very early, but we’re also within the breeding range of the species.
None of these birds, by the way, were making any sounds at all, so nothing to help confirm identification; the only thing making distinctive calls turned out to be a blue jay, making me realize how long it’s been since we had them visible where I’ve lived, and don’t ask me why that is. Here I was thinking, Boy, that sounds exotic, only for the bird to come into view, Oh, it’s just a freaking blue jay – have I ever heard their territorial calls before? I’ll have some shots of those eventually; where I grew up they were as common as muck, and thus I’m (still) too used to them, but they do have some pretty cool coloration.
There were a couple more bird captures this day, both new species, but they held still in plain sight and thus weren’t interested in the holiday – one of those (the birds I mean) will be along tomorrow.
And so begins a new weekly topic, which will consist entirely of images shot right here at Walkabout Estates Plus, since it should be able to provide a decent array of subjects without too many repeats – that’s the goal, anyway.
Now, after deciding on this topic late Wednesday night, I went after a couple of subjects on Thursday but wasn’t successful in capturing anything compelling, and I thought I was going to have to start off with a Carolina anole. But then I went out last night/early this morning after the QuantaridQuadrantid meteors, the first time shooting the night sky on the property, which was almost entirely out of the question at the old place; nestled on the edge of two cities, with a streetlight right at the end of the driveway, and even out back there was only a narrow patch of sky visible through the trees. This place is a bit better.
I think all of those are cypress trees, but you’re looking at Mars in the center there, sitting within Cancer while Gemini is above it. A few minutes before this was taken, while the camera was exposing a section of sky off to the right, a Quantarids Quadrantids meteor cut entirely across this field of view, though probably too dim to have registered very well; it was dying out just as it would have been entering the frame I was taking at the time. Isn’t that how it goes?
But I did another little sample, because a faint haze was illuminated by the town lights as it passed through, and deserved an animation.
The twinkling is actually an artifact of rendering it as a gif (pronounced, “GOY-dr,”) but you can see the haze streaking through. Jupiter is the brightest spot of course, with Aldebaran just below it, Orion over the chimney, and Pleiades over the roof peak. I get a particular impression from this animation, but I’d rather not influence you; how does it make you feel?
I know, it would be better with meteors (wouldn’t everything?) but I shot 80 frames without a capture – it’s not like I wasn’t trying. If I hadn’t said anything about meteors you’d just be looking at the images for the night sky. It’s all about perspective…
The statistics for the site for 2024 aren’t impressive at all, indicating a slow decline over several years. While the oppressive heat and being involved with the move had more than a little to do with it this year, it doesn’t explain the trend over several years (well, the heat may be a small contributing factor.) There’s also the ugly truth that we haven’t done anything more than a couple of weekend trips since 2021, and this year isn’t looking too promising either – we’ll see I guess. There was the eclipse trip last April, but let’s be real: the photo opportunities primarily lasted three minutes.
