Profiles of Nature 56


Hey, we went over a month this time, and it’s been a year since the topic should have died yet we only have four extra episodes, so don’t go complaining.

This Profiles we find Justus demonstrating why birds should never daydream, at least while flying – we swear we saw a Batman visual sound effect flash for a moment when this happened (it was, “Kabash!“) read more

Tripod holes, part 5


N 35.888237° W 79.015528° Google Earth Placemark

I should have done this one two weeks back, when it would only have been six years and three days after it was originally taken, but oh well. This was from January 2017, and there was still a smidgen of snow on the ground even though the morning’s temperatures were pretty nice for January – this is hinted at with the fog, but granted, read more

This is not a comet


It’s probably not too far from what I would have captured if I tried, admittedly, and the intention was to try, just a little later on. This came Friday night, when I stepped out to check conditions and decided to shoot the first-quarter (“half”) moon real quick. This is not the first-quarter moon either, but the [ahem] ‘dagger’ in read more

Tripod holes, part 4


N 27.046105° W 82.400731° Google Earth Placemark

I’m still not sure if the Google Earth Placemark links are actually working – they’re not for me – but if they are for you, this one will be slightly different than the latitude/longtitude coordinates listed, and neither of those actually shows where I was standing, but the coordinates show where these birds were at least. read more

Okay, that works

While typing up the previous post, I realized that a video clip would better illustrate the difficulty in holding a long lens reasonably still, and I stepped out to do a quick clip of whatever I could find, probably just the top of a nearby tree. But as I was doing this, one of the neighbors pointed out that the hawk that I’d seen fly over and disappear as I came out had only gone just around read more

Confused AF

I did an outing yesterday! Granted, it wasn’t a terribly productive outing, and too few of the images will be keepers – including some of the ones you’ll see here. But at least there’s a smidgen of content.

I went down to Jordan Lake to see what was stirring, which wasn’t a lot – just a lone black vulture in the distance, but in the woods near the parking area, read more

No hesitation


Boy, not gonna set any blog records for January, that’s for damn sure. There just hasn’t been anything to photograph, and not enough time or motivation to tackle a couple of the other topics that I have sitting in my blog folder for, you know, when I have the time and motivation.

But it peaked close to 20° today, and that was enough to spark a little nighttime activity. Earlier I’d read more

Tripod holes, part 3


N 33.922551° W 78.069167° Google Earth Placemark

More cheating this week: You will no longer find this boat if you go to this location, at least not according to Google Earth/Google Maps, though where it’s gone I can’t say. Repaired? Dismantled? Driven off by a storm? Looming out of the fog just when our heroes were relaxing? Your guess is probably better, or at least read more

Out there

Stepping out to check on the weather last night since snow flurries were possible, I saw a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in The Jungle at the edge of the property, and stepped further out to chase it/them off (there’s never just one,) not really wanting them to strip any more of the bushes and trees we’re trying to cultivate. Neither my approach nor my scolding read more

Too cool, part 50: Hey sis!

Star formation is a long-drawn-out process, which we know from both basic physics and actually seeing it happening in telescopic views, though we can’t see change in real time. Gases and dust have to be pretty thick in some region of space, molecular clouds to provide the raw materials, which gradually coalesce under combined gravity and with the help of Core-Collapse Supernovae (CCSN,) which read more

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