So let’s see, what have I got to cover today?
There’s the Quadrantids meteor shower peaking in a couple days (well, tomorrow night/Friday morning,) that should be visible for a few days on either side, so if the skies are clear, go for it. If it remains as clear as it is now, I may see if I can get out for the first meteor shower after moving. There were actually several that occurred since then, but I was either too busy or the visibility was wrecked, or it was too cold – there’s a limit to the temperature when all I’m doing is standing around in some dark area craning back to watch the sky. This region has much less light pollution than where we used to live, so this should make things better, right? We’ll see, perhaps.
Then there’s the follow-up to the enigmatic photo yesterday, and it’s this:
This is simply a glass desk ornament of a jellyfish that glows in the dark – which also glows quite well under UV lights, which are those purple spots in the image. When I got the resin 3D printer, the prints from it need to be cured further under UV light; they make a specialty washing and curing ‘station,’ essentially the size of another 3D printer, or you can simply use sunlight, which might overcure and introduce a color shift. Or you can buy a string of UV LEDs and make your own curing lights, which is what I did, for just a few dollars. These lights also work well for anything that fluoresces under UV light, and while in the quest for end-of-month abstract images, I started experimenting a little with what was handy. What I like about this image is that the reflections of the UV LEDs look like bioluminescence from the jellyfish itself, though being offset too far to the side kinda defeats the effect.
While I was at this, I experimented with some other things that didn’t work as well.
This is a very small geode that sits on a shelf above my desk, with an opening no more than 20mm. On a whim, I got out my green laser pointer and was shining it through the geode up from the bottom, which produced an interesting effect from the ‘peak’ in the middle. The resulting images, though, were only in the green spectrum and thus were extremely grainy, even with the addition of another UV light coming in from the front (the crystals in the geode certainly did not fluoresce under this light.) It just didn’t pass muster, but that’s what experimenting is for.
Slightly better results with the next one, yet still not quite what I’d envisioned.
One of the recent prints on the resin printer was a globe ornament intended to have a little LED ‘tealight’ or votive light within, though I found it looked a lot better, and brighter, propped on the color-changing base for those laser-etched globe ornaments instead (mine is an axolotl.) The idea was to capture the change in colors in a still photo, though the whole cycle took about 17 seconds – if you simply let the camera shutter stay open that long, you’d overexpose the ornament and it would only appear white or off-white anyway. So I cut a slot about 10mm wide in a piece of cardboard and introduced that between the ornament and the lens, slowly sliding it from left to right while the shutter was open and the colors changing. Not bad, but you can see that my motion wasn’t nice and smooth, leading to some ‘steps’ in the colors. Some of the colors are also brighter than the others, messing with exposure.
But then I also tried it with a diagonal slot:
If I really wanted to do this properly, I’d find some way to move the slot at a constant speed with a motor of some sort, though that’s way more effort for a simple effect than is warranted; a different color sequence might help as well. Still, for practicing effects, it’s an easy thing to do with household materials.
From a few days back, another image of the sunspots seen through a solar filter.
I apparently missed a decent display a few weeks ago, and I try to get out every week or so to see what happening, but conditions don’t always allow it, and I too often simply forget to do it. I’d intended to tackle this one better, but as soon as I started setting up, the sky began hazing over on its way to full overcast and I had to shelve it for another day. Maybe I’ll try again today.
And finally, a new video from Ze Frank:
That clears out a few things. Once again, happy new year, unless you’re Chinese, or Jewish, or Islamic, or some other stick in the mud. I mean, obviously it should only be on January 1st, c’mon…
One of the more notable traits of some of the rocks in the river, southeast of the bridge, was their curious nature: sharp-edged and quite hard, apparently, but seemingly shaped by the water with some very fluid curves to them. I remember (or not) being suspicious of their shapes, not really believing the water had done that, yet not being sure what was responsible for it. But while there, I got the fartistic image (I believe) at right that I’ve used here before. And I’m almost positive that the very spot was virtually right behind me in the pic below that Jim took without my express permission or knowledge. I’m pretty sure that the camera (a Canon Pro 90 IS, my first digital) is braced against my knee for a slow exposure to capture the running water, and is one of at least two bodies that I had with me, another being the Elan IIe loaded with monochrome film. I would have believed that I had one more with me, the EOS 3 loaded with slide film, but of course that’s a huge question now isn’t it?
I could recognize the viewfinder of the Pro 90 IS in the image above, but also have the photo at left of Jim himself taken during that outing, where I used the flip-out LCD panel to do a very low angle shot from beneath a mushroom, aiming up at Jim. Whether he actually snapped a frame during this time or just posed obligingly I’m not sure, naturally. I am, in fact, including this photo just to get back at Jim a little bit because of what he did to me here. Ha! Didn’t remember me taking this photo, did you Jim? Ha!