Too cool, part 29: Flatulent Enceladus

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a masterpiece of subtlety, belying the fascination to be found in one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus is a small frozen satellite, actually a thick crust of ice over what is believed to be a global ocean atop a rocky core. In other words, a hard center suspended in a ‘water’ read more

November’s abstract (a day late)

Dammit, I meant to post this yesterday, and forgot all about it. I’m disappointing my legions of readers…


While I’ve had it in the back of my mind to maintain this new ‘tradition’ of posting an abstract at month’s end, it hasn’t worked out for every month. But I knew this one was in the running the moment I saw how it had turned out. With read more

Thursday color

Just a few pics without a lot of explanation, because they don’t need it. Two are fairly recent, and one has actually been seen before, dating from May.

Two weeks back, I was at the nearby pond watching what the sunset colors were doing when the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) departed, though a handful of them circled the pond at low level, honking loudly – I can only surmise read more

Macro photography, part nine: Changes

For the past two and a half years, I’ve been using a specialized rig for macro lighting, one that produced dependable and pretty damn good results. But it was not to last. The Sunpak FP38 flat panel flash is a surprisingly neat little package, but like everything that I ever really like read more

Good help is hard to find – sometimes


While looking up details for an earlier post I came across a curious trait of this particular species of assassin bug, and decided I’d like to try and get shots of it in action. I have been too lucky lately, and thought this luck might hold, but alas…

Pale green assassin bugs (Zelus luridus,) seen in several recent posts, are spindly little insects usually measuring less than read more

They’re coming… maybe


I suddenly realized that the term, “meteorology,” with its inherent inaccuracies, must have come from the predictions for meteor showers, since only once has the claim of a “good storm” come true in my experience. An awful lot of times, when I’ve gone out specifically to view one during peak times, I’ve seen nothing.

With that pessimistic opening, I can say that read more

Still not over

When the weather wasn’t bad, I was tied up, and when I had free time, the weather was terrible. Plus, the terrible weather was enough to take the leaves from the trees in most places. Thus, the autumn color season danced away from me this year, but I think it avoided a lot of people, so I’m not going to feel too badly about it.

So when the clear skies and my availability finally synchronized read more

Logistics, logistics

I said in the previous post that more would be coming “in a day or so” after I worked out some details. “Or so” apparently means “five days.” However, that’s nowhere near how long I’ve been waiting.

Back in 2010, I snagged a pair of images of a small unknown insect, one that flew away before I could do anything detailed, and this was before I had the read more

Depends on where you look

We are rapidly approaching ‘peak’ autumn color season here in this section of NC, which is slightly misleading in a couple of ways. First off, peak is different depending on latitude, humidity, and the conditions that the trees were in throughout the summer, so you never have to go very far to find different color conditions. Second, the trees all change at different times and different read more

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