While I did not announce it like I often do here, we’ve just passed the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, tied in with some halfway decent viewing conditions and, unlike many other showers in the past, acceptable temperatures to be standing out in a dark location for hours at a time. I actually went out to try and capture
Category: Astronomy
I am at a loss
Checking out the back forty of Walkabout Estates by the headlamp tonight, I bent down to pick up a couple of things, stood up, and found myself face-to-face with an eastern deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus) perched atop the fence. I’ve seen this several times before – they seem to like traversing the fence – but this one stayed put, even as I leaned close, and flinched
Wrong hemisphere
I went out briefly very early this morning (like 3 AM) and noticed the crescent moon had a reasonably close companion, but wasn’t inclined to set up for a photo session at that hour. I forgot about it until reminded this afternoon, and took a look at Stellarium to see what the companion was, and what it would look like tonight/early
To be improved upon
This is just an initial experiment, which admittedly came up promising, but I’m aiming for better.
The beginnings of the idea have been kicking around in my head for ages, but then this variation came up just a few days ago, and I finally got the chance to pursue it. There’s been some faint color tweaking done to this frame, but otherwise it’s unaltered.
The most realistic-looking
Not the Beehive!
I have a small number of images to post from an outing yesterday, but first, some images from a later outing (because they’re fewer and easier and I’m lazy.) We’ll start with a comparison.
That’s the moon on top, seen through many obscuring tree branches because I wasn’t out there after the moon, but I was using it for sharp focus, because what I was
Wasn’t all birds
Just a trio of images from the same outing last week, when I wasn’t concentrating on birds. Grab shots, as it were.
I don’t know what the tree is, but I liked the angle of the branches in the light of the setting sun. Would have liked a little more buffer space around it, but as they say, you take what you can get, and Photoshop the rest.
A large group of kayakers, much
Hubble comes of age
That’s right, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched 33 years ago today, which makes it now a functioning adult if you’re into Tolkien – ‘course, I don’t think you can be seriously into Tolkien and a functioning adult simultaneously, which is simply an invitation to a flame war, to which I reply, Bring it,you Lazy Lobs…
All that aside, we check out a couple
A low bar
As mentioned earlier, Friday’s outing also produced some sunset colors – more so than normal, but that’s not hard to do in this region of NC, at least. Somebody set the ‘Clearing’ setting for the sky to ‘Sunset’ and so the skies are typically wiped free of clouds at about that time. This time around, the cache was a bit slow in emptying and there remained
Just in time
We (meaning the Iconoclastic Mr Bugg and I) actually had an outing today, er, yesterday, whenever, and I have plenty of pics from that. Though I have another outing tomorrow, er, today, which should result in even more pics, but I need to get some sleep before then, so right now I’m just featuring some quick captures from this evening dark period.
I noticed when out at the lake that the moon
Mixed luck
Widely mixed, even.
So Buggato and I had another outing yesterday, once again to Jordan Lake because, while plants are indeed budding out around here, full bloom is a ways off meanwhile, we’re keeping an eye on bird activity at the lake. And in some cases, it was active.
While seeing double-crested cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) is fairly easy down there, yesterday