While the weather allowed

October 20, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

I mentioned earlier that the Orionids meteor shower is supposed to peak soon, while right now, comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon is brightening and visible just after sunset, naturally to the west. We had perfectly clear skies on Saturday night, so I decided to try my hand at both, beginning with the comet.

[A note about comet names: They start with ‘C’ for comet, then the year discovered. That’s followed by the one-letter abbreviation for the observatory (or group thereof) used to make the discovery, in this case the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS,) a collection of five separated telescopes used in conjunction to detect asteroids of potential hazards to Earth. Since this is the sixth such comet detected by ATLAS in 2025, it has an A6 designation. This is followed by the common name, often the astronomer that made the discovery, but in this case the Mount Lemmon Survey, one of the organizations that examine the data from ATLAS.]

I made a couple of small mistakes in heading out for the narrow window between when it would be dark enough to see the comet, and it dipping below the horizon. The first was, I didn’t take note of the most visible stars nearby to orient with, and the second was, I didn’t take my old smutphone, which actually has a working compass; for some reason, my current one does not include such a thing (and good luck finding any list of specs, anywhere, that tells you what’s included and excluded before purchase.) So I knew my rough coordinates but not a precise orientation.

I was also working with the Tamron 150-600 lens and not a telescope, which would do a much better job if a) I had the tracking motor operational, and b) I had a decent way to attach a camera to it. I fought with the tracking motor for days last year, never quite understanding the controls or getting it working properly, and also found that the eyepiece mount for the scope stands off a camera too far for it to properly focus – I’d need to specially adapt a digital sensor to work properly. This is a large and likely frustrating project that I simply keep avoiding because I’m not a masochist.

But the skies definitely seemed quite clear at twilight.

Right at the horizon, the haze is building a bit, but even with this light there’s a star visible already (high center,) a good sign. After a moderate wait, I started my search.

I was also doing test shots for focus and exposure times, and one of my test subjects kept showing a curious artifact:

This is 1/10 second at f6.3, ISO 6400, knowing that I’d want the shortest exposure possible to keep the motion from showing, especially looking almost due west. But that secondary image below kept appearing, not really looking like a defocused image or artifact, and it wasn’t until I returned home that I determined why: it really was a double-star.

Stellarium had the goods. It was Cor Caroli, and it didn’t even show as a double star in Stellarium until zoomed way in, but I managed to capture a hint of the spectral differences between the two stars. Note, too, that’s it’s only a double star from our perspective, the two being separated by roughly 29 light years.

The other bright point in the sky always showed a noticeable disc shape in my images when I zoomed in on the preview screen, leading me to believe it was Mars.

The shape is likely only due to over-exposure, though. I noticed in the viewfinder that the target was scintillating wickedly, which is something not typically seen on the planets, but none of the stars should resolve as a disc, either. I did a test to capture this scintillation, only the second time I’ve done this, and it came out much better than expected.

To get this, I loosened the panning lock and rotated the tripod head until the target was just out of the frame, then locked the shutter open for a few seconds while I panned across, smearing the target entirely across the frame. The spectrum that this produced was fantastic, really showing off the colors and no longer looking ‘reddish.’ This was not Mars, but Arcturus (magnitude 0.15, so actually brighter than Mars at the moment, which is quite dim,) again determined once I got back home.

Not locating the comet or anything that looked promising, I began doing several time exposures in the rough direction, hoping to stir it up that way. And one of the things that I stirred up were satellites – really, a lot of them.

I enhanced this six-second exposure (again, f6.3, ISO 6400) to bring out the trails a little, though the two crossing right in the center should be visible enough; there are actually eight satellite trails visible in the frame, mostly because this was soon after sunset in the western sky and the satellites were high enough to still be reflecting sunlight.

And though I didn’t realize it at the time, I caught the comet, too, up there in upper right corner. A couple of frames later on, I did spot it in the preview, zoomed in slightly here.

Now located properly, I could set about trying to get a detailed shot. I still couldn’t see it by naked eye, and even knowing where to look in the viewfinder at 600mm it was barely visible, but I could frame it at least.

This is a seven-second exposure, cropped a lot tighter now, and obviously way too long to be distinct, but at least there’s clear evidence of the coma and tail, and I even captured the greenish color.

I did a few frames at much shorter times, as well, but the tail about vanishes.

Still a hint of motion blur in there at a mere one-second exposure, and only enough coma to distinguish this as a comet. I also shot a few frames in RAW mode too, to see if that edge would allow more detail to be coaxed out in editing, but nada. Really, the only solution is by tracking to counteract the motion of the Earth’s rotation and keep this smearing out of the frame (though I admit I haven’t tried image-stacking software to combine multiple exposures together, a common technique of astrophotographers and astronomers.)

[A note about this: Since the motion blur/trails are being caused by the rotation of the Earth, a tracking platform has to rotate the opposite way, at the same speed, aligned on the same axis – this means celestial north, or aligned precisely with Polaris, the north star. It doesn’t matter where the camera or scope is pointing, as long as the mount that it’s on is rotating the correct way. This means being able to see Polaris clearly, or precise altitude/azimuth alignments otherwise, though for a ten- to sixty-second exposure, it probably doesn’t have to be too precise. It’s still fussy to set up, and that’s if you know the motor is working properly – I spent all that time last year never getting the motor to act the way that it should.]

That was enough messing about after the comet, which I knew I wasn’t going to improve upon that night. But later on, back home, I was burning off a bunch of fallen branches and debris and decided to get the camera out again, to play with the fire and also try for Orionids meteors.

I purposefully framed it so the house and trees were peeking into view at the edges, lit by the fire. That diamond in the center is Delphinus, which means that the Milky Way is off to the right, mostly obscured and with too low an exposure to bring out distinctly. Not long afterward, I had re-aimed and added some branches that still had drying cypress needles on them to produce some sparks for light trails.

I would have really liked a nice fireball Orionid meteor to have streaked through, to make a solid composition, but noooo. This is nowhere near Orion, but Orion is simply the radiant, where the majority of meteors seem to originate from, though they can appear anyplace in the sky, and in only one shower/storm did I notice a distinct tendency to come from the radiant (Leonids in 2001, and only right at the peak hours.)

By the way, I was watching the sparks, and they were very short-lived, winking out while still high in the air, so little risk of igniting anything else, but I was also out there long enough to monitor things anyway.

Like doing trails of car lights on the road, there’s a knack to capturing fire sparks; as you can see here, the smoke also catches the firelight to an extent, and it was easy to aim too low to overwhelm the frame with sparks, making the background stars inconsequential – I have several frames like that. The wind conditions were practically nonexistent, another reason that I chose Saturday night for the fire. Also – since I ran afoul of this – get focus pinned down and leave the lens on manual, otherwise the camera is liable to hunt in the darkness and produce defocused light trails.

Now, achieving sharp focus? That can be really tricky, especially depending on the lens. For a shorter focal length/wider angle, usually it’s not too crucial, since the lens will hit hyperfocal distance easily and even faintly out-of-focus stars are small enough in the frame not to look bad; this becomes a lot harder with telephotos lengths, like the comet earlier in the evening. Generally, I pick the brightest star I can find, or occasionally the anti-collision lights of a radio tower over a kilometer off, to focus upon manually, then do a test exposure and chimp on the image afterward, zooming in tight to see how sharp the light is (the moon also works in this regard.) Once satisfied, I endeavor not to even bump the focus ring. This technique is a hell of a lot harder with a zoom lens that doesn’t have constant focus, meaning that as you rack the focal length in or out, the focus actually changes, making it impossible to go tight to focus and then back off to frame usefully; in such cases all you can do is focus at the focal length that you intend to use.

Last one:

By this point I’d shifted and re-aimed and was trying solely for meteors, of which I (as usual) caught absolutely none. This is pretty close to centered on Pegasus, so high in the west-southwest sky; the Milky Way is obscured to the right, and Saturn hidden behind the trees to the left. Pretty good array of stars in there, and short enough exposures (10 seconds, f3.5, ISO 1600) to prevent visible star trails.

Conditions last night were scattered, and the forecast for later in the week, as we hit peak, are not encouraging, so this might have been the only chance I had for meteors, for days at least. Not that it typically matters anyway…

Nowhere is safe!

October 19, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

In the past two days, I’ve gotten a shitload of images, at least four post’s worth, so I’ll be working my way down through them over the next few days (hopefully without adding too many as I go.) Right now, we’ll stick to a minor bit of drama.

Going past the fireplace last night, I thought something looked off, and a closer look revealed why.

Not really sure when or how the Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis) got inside, though it really is inevitable, but it was quite amusing to find it snoozing atop the fireplace screen. Luckily, it never attracted the attention of Monster, who’s an avid hunter even though she’s never allowed outside.

Enlisting the help of The Girlfriend, we got a cardboard box and gently approached, attempting to either get it in hand or shoo it into the box. This went well for a moment, since the awakened anole jumped down into the box quickly, and then shot back out again – they can climb damn near anything, and now disturbed, it was intent on achieving a good hiding place. It launched itself to the floor and thankfully set off in an open direction, so it was easy to track. I got down and cupped it within my hands, yet it escaped before they were fully closed, but again, went out over the open wood floor. Trying again, I attempted to close off all gaps immediately, but realized that I wasn’t feeling a damn thing in my hands. A quick check confirmed this: my hands were empty.

Now, the living room is naturally dark, but I was using my headlamp and The Girlfriend has a flashlight in hand, and neither one of us saw it escape across the open floor, at all. It appeared to have just vanished. Near as I can determine, when it slipped my grasp it went straight under one arm where my view was blocked, and apparently so was The Girlfriend’s. I froze and checked everyplace carefully, thinking it might have gone to ground under my knees or even climbed my leg; my arms were bare so I would have felt it clambering up them at least. Yet, despite our careful checks and subsequent search of the entire area, no further sign of the anole was found. Nothing for it but to see if it showed itself again, preferably to us and not to Monster.

It was about midday today when it did indeed show itself again:

Those are the stairs up – it’s only on the second step, and not far from the nearest window. It is also about two meters from where it was last seen, so presumably it found a hiding place nearby.

This time, I got a large, smooth plastic water bottle, plus a long-handled bait net, and approached again, working on my own this time since The Girlfriend was at a class. But the anole, quite complacent until actually nudged, gave one false start and then dove into the water bottle with exceptional cooperation. It was a simple matter to take it out onto the deck and place it unceremoniously onto one of the ginkgos thereon.

Since the nights have gotten chilly, the anole might have thought it had a good thing going until I returned it outside, but the access to bugs and water is significantly better out there, to say nothing of the freedom from Monster (the other two cats might have followed it and even batted it around a bit, but they aren’t hunters at all and likely wouldn’t have killed it. Monster, though…)

Even more anole schtuff is coming soon, but I’m going to space it out a bit – luckily I have several other subjects to work with.

Estate Find XLII

October 17, 2025October 17, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

You’ll notice that I corrected the roman numerals this time, after blowing it for the last two Estate Find posts – don’t ask me what I was thinking. And we have nothing new for this one, but we’ll feature two for the week anyway.

The first was done at the same time as the previous post’s pics, only about a meter or so away. I saw a flash of movement as I got closer, otherwise I likely would have missed this one.

This is so bizarre-looking because this juvenile green treefrog (Dryophytes cinereus) had backed quickly down under the water collected at the base of the elephant ear leaf stems, which distorted the view a bit. I would have liked to have captured it above the water’s surface a bit, but the frog wasn’t cooperating.

That was with the Sigma 180 macro. I returned a little later with the 18-135, again watching the frog duck back down out of sight. This time the focal length allowed more of the flash’s light to get in there.

I checked early in the evening too, but this guy had already headed out to do its damage to the local insect population.

And then we have more from the wood ducks, included again because the mob scene that now takes place really needs witnesses.

That is an almost disturbing number of wood ducks, and what’s startling to see is how they slip in almost unnoticed. They’re quite adept at using the existing cover to come in close, and will expand from a handful to a few dozen in mere seconds. And while occasionally we know what spooks them, such as the AC fan kicking on or the squirrels getting too excited, most times it’s a complete mystery why they suddenly all fly off, but it usually looks like one of them panics over something.

How many of these are the ducklings that we were watching earlier? It’s difficult to say, but if you look closely (especially right after they fly off farther into the pond,) you can see some males that don’t have as vivid or complete markings as the others, or seem a little smaller – these are likely some of the broods that were raised here this season. Most times, the pond is entirely quiet all day long, with the first calls that may be gathering the flock together starting in late afternoon. The video was shot just a little before sunset, but the ducks weren’t venturing out until the sun had dipped behind the trees, and it’s been made abundantly clear over the last year that this is completely intentional – it’s rare to see them in sunlight at all, so my attempts to get nice portraits that show off their iridescent feathers are usually thwarted.

Now, am I going to do a blind or something to get a closer, different vantage? Maaayyybe, though I’d have to be in position perhaps half an hour or more earlier and remain completely silent, with no movement showing, since we know how easy they are to spook. And simply the addition of the blind or camouflaging ‘stuff’ might be enough to make them too wary. I’ll think about it…

New York state of mind

October 15, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

I know, no posts for five days and I come back with that previous one. You’ve probably already switched over to some celebrity gossip site, haven’t you?

I blame it on conditions. For over a week we’ve been dealing with the side effects of some storm system and it’s been solid overcast the entire time – that’s simply not normal for this area. However, this is directly comparable to cloud conditions for damn near the entirety of New York winters – not temperature-wise, at least, it only got a little chilly, but the solid slate sky and believing you’re a ghost because you cast no shadow, that’s New York. So there’s the hit to the mood, but more importantly, it greatly reduces the photographic opportunities.

That said, I got a handful of pics today, before the sun broke out again, even. Nothing new, of course, but some pics nonetheless, so I’ll feature a couple here.

First, be it known that the Orionids meteor shower is going on now, but will peak the night of the 21^st, which coincides with a new moon, so pretty much the best viewing conditions, especially as the humidity should now be dropping seriously and reducing atmospheric haze. I think we had a decent sky for only one night of the Draconids, about a week ago, and I wasn’t able to get out for that, so maybe this time. As always, if you don’t see a post about them, it means I had my usual shitty luck with meteors.

So in poking around the yard today, I happened to look closely at the elephant ear plants alongside the back walk and spotted this guy.

This gives you an idea of conditions, since this was midday and the Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) should have been out running around scarfing up bugs – it wasn’t that cold, but apparently this one wasn’t good with it anyway. Funny – I was using the Sigma 180 macro and the edges of the stem, much closer and thus far out-of-focus, where blurring over the eyes of the anole, but as the aperture stopped down when the shutter opened, they cleared a little better.

A little later on I’d switched to the 18-135, and as I approached the plant again I saw the head of the anole duck back into the hollow of the stems, leaving behind only this hint of its presence:

Rather desperate-looking, isn’t it? The anole, however, was only holding onto a near-vertical surface and not clutching wildly for a rope. Changing position slightly revealed a more complacent view.

There are several different species of plant known as “elephant ear,” and I have yet to determine which this is – slack, I know. If it’s important to you, you can do some kind of Venmo or CashApp transfer to spur me onwards – it won’t work, because I don’t use the stupid things (people will use their smutphones for anything except actually talking,) but I’ll register the desire anyway.

The first hints of fall colors have begun, and I should be able to find some prime examples in a week or two. Plus I just missed a veritable shitload of wood ducks since the bathroom window wasn’t open when they arrived this evening – it has the best view, but they’ll both hear and see me opening it and fly off, so once they’re arriving it’s too late, but there were at least thirty descending on the corn – rather frantically and boorishly, really. Hopefully I’ll have some more pics of them soon.

Without even trying

October 15, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

Today is National Grouch Day (no foolin’) and in the past, I’ve had a list of ways to participate, to which I will refer you since I’m almost certain that you haven’t yet tried them all, and coming up with new ideas that are not variations of the same things is a great way to get me irritable – yes, that fits the bill, but then you don’t get to participate too, and merely observing the holiday in others is exceptionally poor spirit.

However, I have found that, inadvertently, I have stumbled upon the ways to celebrate it anyway. The first was, to simply suggest to The Manatee that he download GIMP to do some simple edits on images, which then led him to a long and frustrating process in attempting to find a version compatible with his mAcoS version, or alternately to see what it would take to upgrade his version – like me, he does not pursue the upgrade schedule that manufacturers suggest (read: try to force upon users) and ran afoul of GIMP no longer listing old enough versions through normal channels. All to just rescale (and maybe crop) some photos that I could’ve/should’ve done anyway.

Meanwhile, I celebrated it personally by once again tackling an issue that’s been bugging me – granted, this was ahead of schedule and not today, but it’s the frustration that counts, right? That saga, already in draft form this morning, lies below:

I have a semi-custom computer, a ‘mini-tower’ except it’s not all that mini, which has all of the extras that I use regularly: multiple hard drives for backups and countless projects, memory card reader, programmed gaming mouse with custom functions, and so on. And one of the things that’s been bugging me, for a long time now, has been the external speakers.

I don’t use them that often (mostly headphones,) but there are times when it’s seriously handy to have them. And at some point after switching over to Ubuntu Studio as my operating system, I realized that the left speaker wasn’t functioning. And this began a seriously long saga that I’m now going to relate as a lesson.

The first thing was, the headphones worked fine on both channels/ears, so it wasn’t a mono/stereo setting. And I bumped out the plug part way from the back of the unit and got sound from the left speaker. So far so good. Then I started playing.

I went into everything about Ubuntu and sound management that I could, and nothing fixed it. I tried switching speaker sets, and got the same result. I ordered another sound card (since I’d been using the onboard, built-in one) and tried that out. Same result. Had to be something in the sound drivers.

Now, Linux and Ubuntu are notoriously bad about handling sound, for unknown reasons, and still have a legacy sound handler called Pulseaudio that is widely recognized as shit – why Ubuntu Studio (which is specifically aimed towards music, video, and image editing) installed this damn thing, I’ll never know. The replacement for this software package is Pipewire, and I’d installed it, but never got it operational. Still, I had to suspect that Pulseaudio was doing something that it shouldn’t.

So I spent a couple of days (off and on, of course) trying to get Pipewire properly installed and operational, with conflicting instructions available. Several times when I thought I had it, I ran a check and Pulseaudio was still the default sound program. After much fucking around, I finally got Pipewire working and Pulseaudio off.

And yet, still no left speaker. So I disconnected the speaker set and connected them instead to another computer, and lo and behold, the left speaker failed there too. Now, bear in mind that, right near the very start of all this playing around, I’d backed the plug out and gotten the left speaker working, albeit from the right channel, but working. Fine, okay, pulled out the original speaker set and tested those on the other computer. They worked fine in both channels.

Plugged those back into my computer, and no left channel. Somewhere in the past, I’d removed the new sound card since it hadn’t seemed to be the solution, and two sound cards was confusing Ubuntu (especially since the headphones were going through the front port, so the onboard card.) Nonetheless, I dug it back out, installed it, and disabled the onboard sound card. And now both channels were working fine!

The lesson here is that, after finding the first speaker set worked if I backed the plug out, I switched them with another set, without running full diagnostics in order. Both the left speaker connection on the onboard sound card and the left channel on the second set of speakers were bad – I just dodged the step that would have revealed this by swapping things at the wrong times.

The takeaway: Do things one step at a time, in order, repetitively if necessary, to be sure of your diagnosis. In part, I swapped speakers at the wrong time (a working set for a non-working set,) and in part, I wasn’t thinking of the coincidence of both the sound card port and one of the speaker sets having the exact same failure point.

Now, in doing this, the headphone port on the front stopped making good contact, after much fussing a few months back to replace it too, so now more replacement parts are on order. Worse, that front panel comes from the onboard sound card, and I think it has to since it’s custom-wired and all that shit. I have had extremely bad luck with the onboard cards on this motherboard (the video, the network, and now the sound card have all been bypassed by using PCI cards because they’ve all been undependable.) So I’m not thrilled about having to re-enable it to have working headphones. I’ll be looking into avoiding this somehow – unfortunately, the speaker set that I’m using, while featuring a desktop power switch and volume control, does not have a headphone port built into it like some.

But some better news: Curious about just where the second speaker set was dropping out the left channel/speaker, I popped it open and did some basic diagnostics, in meticulous order this time. The desktop left and right speakers plug into the main, ‘woofer’ portion that sits under the desk, via a standard 3.5mm stereo plug, so that’s where I started. Doing the same ‘backing out’ trick I did indeed get detailed sound from the left speaker, so the speaker itself wasn’t blown, but this could mean either the connection or the sound itself (since backing it out only forces it to contact the right speaker connection instead, and had that side gone bad, it would have been even harder to diagnose); the latter would be a component issue and likely not fixable with my current knowledge. So I checked the continuity on the socket itself on the back of the woofer unit, and it all seemed fine. Then I split open the plug on the desktop speakers, which in typical manner had been assembled and then the rubber shielding actually cast over the whole thing, meaning it had to be cut away. but I have several replacement parts of this type already – mostly, what I needed to know was which color wire went to which terminal on the replacement plug, which simply cutting the wires wouldn’t tell me. Once determined, I soldered the wires to the replacement plug and bam!, all speakers working correctly now.

This unit has a headphone port right on the remote power/volume switch that extends to the desktop, but The Girlfriend wanted them so she wouldn’t have to keep plugging and unplugging her headphones into her own mini-tower, and I don’t blame her because the manufacturer of that one thought the case looked sleeker by making the port almost impossible to see, because the looks of a computer are far more important than the mere functionality of it (something that Apple embraced enthusiastically.) So I still have to re-solder a new headphone socket into my own mini-tower, when it arrives (I’ve got five on order, partially in case of another failure, mostly because it was cheap enough to up the number.) If you ask me nicely enough, I’ll be back to relate how that went!

TL;DR: No way. It’s National Grouch Day – go back and read that all from the beginning, you slack-ass.

Estate Find XXXXI

October 10, 2025October 9, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

We have The Manatee over as a guest this week and have thus been busy doing things other than chasing critters, but I have to give him credit for finding this one, immediately upon my commenting that I needed to try and find something. Our first view comes from inside, looking out, early in the morning:

For reasons unknown, one window of Stately Walkabout Manor has been overtaken by several webs of funnel-weaver spider (Agelenidae,) and in one such web was sprawled this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis,) looking like I’d caught it in mid-fall. This was early in the morning when the night had been pretty cool, and the sun wasn’t hitting the window yet, so I wasn’t sure if the anole had somehow gotten caught in the web or simply chosen it as a hammock to snooze within the previous night. From the outside, it was much higher, and so I took a stepstool with me when I went out there.

I liked capturing the multiple reflections off of the double-paned glass, and we can see here that the anole is awake. The various funnel-weaver spiders in the US, unlike the funnel-web spiders of Australia, have ‘medically insignificant’ venom and so they’re not dangerous to people, though I cannot vouch for how their venom might affect an anole – or whether they’d even consider biting one rather than hiding in the tunnel attached to their web, the typical protective response. The anole’s position looks awkward, but this really isn’t any indication, since they can sleep in some pretty odd positions.

Once on the stepstool, I was a lot closer and could see things better, but still couldn’t determine if the anole was caught in any way. My proximity wasn’t enough to send it scurrying for cover however, and it wasn’t until I reached up and began trying to scoop it from the web that the anole panicked and fought itself free, dropping from the web to the windowsill – I’ve watched them perform similar and greater drops to no harm, since they weigh very little and absorb the impact with their legs and belly. This one scampered off and disappeared through a gap in the deck boards, so I remain unsure if the anole really intended to sleep that way or not. Either way, you have to appreciate the dynamic pose of that first silhouette.

Some spiders

October 9, 2025October 8, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

While I have some video clips to edit together, that will take some time, and I already have these pics edited and ready to go, so we’ll have them first. Lucky us, eh?

First, we have a follow-up, rather badly outdated now, for one that was featured about a month ago. The white-banded crab spider (Misumenoides formosipes) in that post, eating well on the black knight butterfly blossoms despite being bright yellow and so about as contrasty as she could get, soon afterward changed color a bit – not to blend in any better, but perhaps it was enough to be mistaken for something innocuous.

I’ve seen this before: the blossoms of the butterfly bush don’t last very long, but the crab spiders like them and will hang out for quite some time, past when I would have thought any pollinators would still be visiting. And yet, I witnessed this same spider with a moth that she had captured the night following these pics, so it seems my judgment is lacking in that regard.

In fact, I saw this spider with a moth more often than not, and she grew quickly. Within a couple of days she could no longer be found, and I’m surmising that she went off to lay eggs. I looked, but could find no evidence of these. That was three weeks ago, so the young might be getting close to hatching, if I could only find where the egg sac went.

More recently, a new arrival on the hanging rosemary plant was found.

This is right alongside the front door to Stately Walkabout Manor, but she’s not bothering anybody and stays put, so no biggie. This is a black-and-yellow argiope (Argiope aurantia,) usually called a garden spider where I grew up, but a lot of species have received that colloquial name. This is maybe about half of the size that they can get up to, which isn’t quite as big as the golden silk orbweavers, but still impressive.

It’s actually a little late in the season for this one; a few others of the same species, as well as most of the golden silk orbweavers that we had around, have vanished now – again, presumably, to lay their eggs, which is largely the end of their life cycle. Some spiders hang around to run interference for the young in a nursery after they hatch, some actually gather food for their young, but I think both of these species die soon after reproducing. Seems short to us, but it’s fairly common among arthropods.

Very close by on the adjacent camellia bush, we have the other end of the size spectrum – well, not really, but a distinct disparity at least.

I did a few frames in different conditions, trying to get something sharp and well-exposed, but neglected to try and get a distinct measurement until after it had disappeared, but let’s go with a body length of 2mm – it was barely even visible in the web from a normal viewing distance. I had initially and confidently pegged this as a juvenile orchard orbweaver, but as I looked that up again for the scientific name, I found I was wrong -the markings are ever-so-slightly different, and this is simply a Leucauge argyrobapta, no common name according to BugGuide.net. Very closely related, but with some subtle differences.

In fact, BugGuide doesn’t even list the distinctions, but those two spots on the lower rear abdomen seem to define it. Looking at the taxonomic changes listed there, it appears that this was considered an orchard orbweaver or orchard spider (Leucauge venusta,) up until 2018 when a new species was split off.

[Amusingly, that page lists the range as “Florida south to Brazil. Possibly along the southeast coast from maybe North Carolina to Louisiana.” Yet their collection of photos has examples throughout North Carolina and out to Texas – who knows what it takes to make this ‘official?’]

This is one of many species of spider that sits belly-up in the web, so to get this I had to be down at ground level shooting up upwards, and I waited until nightfall to get this because the daytime breezes constantly moved the web out of focus. While the abdomen might look white and overexposed here, it really is silvery, close to appearing chromed, and what this possibly does for them, I have no idea. Again, BugGuide doesn’t list a size range, but the sister species has an adult female range of 5.5-7.5mm, so presumably the same – this is definitely a juvenile. Very faintly visible here, the hindmost pair of legs has a ‘ribcage’ of longer hairs flaring out near the body, and again, what purpose this serves I cannot say. Perhaps they’re just chrome polishers…

Sitting in a film can right now, I have another, absolutely tiny spider recently caught on my desk, but this is so small that I’m going to be doing the extreme macro thing to capture any decent pics, and I haven’t tackled that yet. We’ll see how that goes…

They’re coming back

October 8, 2025October 8, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

It’s been interesting watching the various wildlife that rotates around Walkabout Estates Plus, their schedules and habits, though we’ve only been here a year and so we don’t know if these are schedules. The visitors we like the most are the wood ducks, but they remain exceptionally spooky and so photos and video of them are tricky, often having to be shot through the upstairs bathroom window because they don’t like human presence anyplace where we can easily be seen.

Their first appearance last year was… well, it wasn’t an appearance, since we only heard the calls, and those started almost exactly a year ago. I managed a couple of glimpses of them over the next few weeks, but it wasn’t until well into the winter when they began visiting the main pond off the backyard, which is when we began putting down corn, and that certainly encouraged them to be coming up more often. We saw activity throughout the spring, and new broods in spring and summer, and then as the broods were getting their adult plumage in, they all but vanished, and the visits were few and far between. Still, the corn was disappearing and I suspected that early morning visits were occurring, so I got up well before first light and got the camera set up in the window. That worked.

In the spring we’d had them coming well up into the yard and were hoping to get them a little habituated to our presence, but then one of the females fell prey to a red-shouldered hawk that was also hanging around, and we felt that we might have contributed to this from our feeding habits. So now the corn only gets distributed down at the edge of the pond, while the wood ducks themselves seem to have changed their habits, since they venture up little more than a meter away from the water’s edge, and only at dawn and dusk – getting well-lit pics is going to be challenging.

The first clips, by the way, were what I mentioned in last week’s Estate Find, my potential goal, and were indeed shot on that Friday morning, though I already had the mantidfly up by then. The mob clips were obtained Sunday, and I’ve just been trying to get the time to put them together and do the voiceover since then. I get to these things eventually…

Mere trivia

October 7, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

As if most of my posts aren’t the exact same thing…

So, two purposes for this one. The first is a reminder that the Draconids meteor shower is going on right now and expected to peak tomorrow night, actually around 19:00 UTC on October 8^th, which is 15:00 EDT, or 3 PM Eastern (because we’re somehow still observing this asinine clock-changing bullshit.) So okay, in the Americas, we probably won’t see much at peak unless we’re really lucky and one of those brilliant daytime fireballs occurs, but we can still be out when it gets dark enough and may see something. Will I personally get the chance? Probably not, but we’ll see.

The other purpose is to dump a few pics that won’t otherwise fit into a topic. The other day I went out to Goose Creek State Park to see if I could find anything, and the answer was, “Barely.” Really not much going on at that time, except for a handful of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that viewed me with apparent confusion, unsure whether they should alert the authorities or not. One flipped me off with its tail as I attempted to get some captivating images.

That nose came up really distinctly, like a gorilla offering a two handfuls of vanilla ice cream. Or is that just me?

When I got to the more scenic areas, the cloud cover was seriously rolling in and the light levels and color went to hell, so I was forced to skip any landscape shots. But I stumbled across an odd tableau of grasshoppers along one of the boardwalks.

It’s unusual to find a grasshopper that won’t leap away as you draw close, and quite rare to find a trio of them clustered together like this. I suspect that the larger one is a female, and the two smaller ones are courting males, but that’s just a guess. I also did a quick search to try and determine what species these were, but couldn’t pin it down from the photos that I got, all from this perspective. Possibly an obscure bird grasshopper, but that’s as close as I came. The sizes seem right at least.

But yeah, not a great day for activity at the park. I’d snagged this one before I left home, though:

There’s six of them here, and they all appear to be yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta.) As busy as Turtle Island was in the winter and early spring, the turtles stopped using it from late spring throughout the summer, though they’re back now. My guess is that, between the warmer water temperatures and the thicker foliage obscuring the sun more, the turtles saw no reason to be basking on the island, and were rarely found even on the logs that were receiving regular sunlight. But as the overnight temperatures dropped (and thus the water temperature as well,) they found that a good sunning session was welcome. There had been even more of them, but a few of them dropped off the island at my approach. We’ll see if we can top last winter’s record of nineteen on this little tussock.

That’s it for now; putting these up since I won’t have the video done too soon due to time constraints. It’ll get here.

Using the moon

October 5, 2025 Al DenelsbeckLeave a comment

So, I should be catching up with writing some posts that have images awaiting usage, or editing video, or cleaning up Walkabout Studios, or any number of other things, but instead I went out last night to use the bright moonlight for some experiments. Which turned out okay, really, and that’s better than a lot of experiments that I do, one of which is another waiting post.

The back forty of Walkabout Estates is almost entirely shrouded by trees, with only a patch near the house and over the deck that gets open sky, and that faces between straight up and a little north, so not too much direct sunlight or moonlight there either, especially as we close in on the winter months and the sun and moon get lower. The main pond gets a fair amount or sunlight, but for only half of the day, well after sunrise and into mid-afternoon before the trees again throw a lot of shade; however, many of these are the cypress which will lose their leaves/needles/whatevers pretty soon and so the light will get better. The time was right to use the moonlight on the pond, though.

Yes, that’s all moonlight – this is 115 seconds at f8, ISO 800, and you’re looking at diminutive Duck Island to the left, with the ‘apron’ where the ducks, turtles, and nutria come onshore at lower right. At center, that little patch of brighter water separate from the main body is the channel down to The Bayou, the lower pond. Everything remains shrouded in duckweed, but the yellow cow lilies that once formed a low forest across the water have been decimated again by the beavers, I believe, though the lateness of the season may also be a contributing factor. What has me curious is that the shadowed side of the trees on Duck Island have a notable amount of light showing on them, and I’m not sure what this is from – it might be reflected moonlight from the water’s surface. Weird, anyway.

I changed perspective and focal length a little, and added an element:

I framed for both the moon and the single strand of Spanish moss that hangs down all by itself, though it was more centered than I intended (it’s really, really hard to tell when peering at the viewfinder image by moonlight, or even with the assistance of the headlamp.) I stood in the frame for about 90 seconds out of the 120, right where all the critters come ashore, and had enough of a dark background (and the lighter shirt of course) that virtually no ghostly effect took place even though I wasn’t in the frame for 1/4 of the exposure time. But this gives an idea of how far offshore Duck Island lies, and how small it really is.

I moved over a bit and aimed about 90° to the right to catch a different portion, having to change exposure significantly to do so.

Turtle Island wasn’t quite catching direct moonlight, but it’s those pale trunks visible in the center; this is now 26 seconds at f3.5, ISO 1600, done this way to prevent having star trails from a longer exposure. There are some details at the top that we need to see better:

I could see that the ‘M’ shape of constellation Cassiopeia was peeking almost perfectly from the branches and framed to capture that, even though a lot of the fainter stars came up brighter and made the main stars less prominent, but also captured something that I use Cassiopeia to find: M31, the Andromeda galaxy, is that fuzzy object off of the branch tips to upper right. I didn’t really expect to capture that, but I’ll take it. One of these days, I’ll manage to get it in much greater detail, but this is not bad at all for 26 seconds at freaking 10mm focal length, as wide as I can achieve with my current lens lineup.

And one more.

This is looking in the same direction as the first two images, just a lot further back into the yard; the thin trees of Duck Island can be found peeking between the cypress trunks just left of center. I wanted the wider angle to pick up the shadows of the trunks by moonlight, but the direct light was a little too obscured. The glow to the right, however, is where the streetlamp on the corner peeks into the backyard past the house, about the only place it does, though it shows really well in the front yard. It has a faintly ominous quality to it that I might have to play with some more.

So not bad for a few minutes of playing around, but if I’m going to do landscapes by moonlight, I need to find a more scenic spot. I imagine I can dig something up…

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