The anticipation is killing me!

Al Denelsbeck

No, not christmas, though I am looking forward to that, because we have this tradition of reenacting giving birth in a rickety food trough full of hay while curious sheep keep nosing around, and it’s hilarious – it takes talent to adequately produce Joseph’s expression of being cuckolded by a deity. No, not winter season, because fuck that. No, not even the eventual effective rebuilding of the Walkabout Studios computer suite – well, no, yes, I really am looking forward to that, if only for the cessation of time-consuming, headache-inducing actions (you try formatting drives and copying 800+Gb of information, repeatedly because there’s an intentional amount of redundancy among drives, only to find that something isn’t working again. Repeatedly.)

Instead, I’m referring to the next post, and let me tell you about that. Whatever follows will tie me for the record number of posts that I’ve made in a year, and the next photo you see here will be the 1,000th photo for the year (blowing the previous record so far out of the water it enters orbit.)

Now, this amazing coincidence could only take place if, uh, this interim post existed, which only demonstrates extremely bad planning on my part; next year I will endeavor to know exactly what will post and when, the photos I will obtain throughout the year and the topics that will present themselves. According to all scientific principles, there is nothing truly random so this is possible if I try hard enough. For instance, this year I was remiss in not investigating how many new parking lots were being produced across the country, so I wasn’t up-to-date on the air-mass heating this would produce and thus the affect on the rain storms and subsequent affect on the development of the autumn color change. Slack, I know.

This lack of foresight extends to not even knowing what that photo will be, though I have several candidates, but this means I can’t even drop hints if I wanted to. Will it be old? Will it be brand new? Will it even be mine? I can’t say! Isn’t it delicious?

And of course, I milked a post out of an upcoming post, which demonstrates my amateur status as a blogger, but so does my not getting a goddamn cent for any of this, so…

The days of yore, part five

Al Denelsbeck

pond scene lacking fall colors
Admittedly, these photos are not from very long ago at all – slightly over a week, to be forthright – so this isn’t terribly yorey, but that’s the title I’m going with. Mostly, I’m doing a little catchup from the past few weeks of thin posts while I tackled numerous other things, but really, I wasn’t shooting then either, so we have just a representation from a single outing. I’m not impressed with the photo above, but that’s the point – I’m illustrating just how unscenic it’s been, and how few autumn colors were visible, which is why I named the image, “FallColorSingular.” And now I’ll demonstrate how I virtually always end up working with such, since the trees in the immediate area all turn colors at different times, and there is rarely any such thing as a ‘peak time’ for colors here. Sure, other places can boast of those, but not here.

So see that one itty bitty little red American sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua) there on the shore to the left? Let’s use that.

Canada geese Branta canadensis in front of fall foliage on American sweetgum Liquidambar styraciflua
Working from across the pond with the Canon 100-300L lens, I had the setting, but I needed the subject, and waited patiently for the Canada geese (Branta canadensis) to swim into the frame – which took longer than expected, because they were dilly-dallying, or maybe lollygagging, and taking their own sweet time about it. I suppose that makes this a lollygaggle of geese, but regardless, I was mentally coaxing them along, which I’ve long ago proven does not work at all, though what else was I gonna do? Even if I had a bunch of bread crumbs with me, my throwing arm isn’t that good. Eventually, they came across and I got the framing I was after, then cropped it tighter for its use here, highlighting those colors enough to make it seem like they were more prominent than they were, as well as putting a little color into the water from the reflection.

Technically, this is the latter composition, because I started my circuit of the pond from the other side and thus passed right alongside that tree initially, so this was the approach then.

muscovy ducks Cairina moschata passing behind backlit American sweetgum Liquidambar styraciflua
I didn’t have to wait on these muscovy ducks (Cairina moschata) because they were entering the frame on their own, possibly following me around the pond in the hopes of a handout, but that meant that this time, I was quickly positioning myself for the framing. Facing into the sun now, the leaves were backlit for a brilliant effect, but the ducks became near-silhouettes, and yes, I framed the sunburst reflection in there on purpose; regrettably, this showed the residues atop the water very distinctly, making it almost appear like ice, when really they were barely noticeable. But it certainly made the most of one tree.

Now, there’s been a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) hanging around for several weeks, and it’s a spooky one, rarely allowing any kind of close approach and not posing very well. But this particular day I had more luck than all previous, and managed a few compositions before it flew further off like a whiny little girl. We’ll start with the wider perspective.

great blue heron Ardea herodias perched on piling in front of trees
Not exactly a representative autumn shot, but ignoring that, it works okay as a scenic in my book. I tried not having the heron on the centerline of the frame, but that introduced other distractions, so we’ll cope.

And then, as I continued around the shoreline, the elements lined up differently and I had a new composition.

great blue heron Ardea herodias with smidgen of fall colors and reflections
First off, there are two trees contributing orange colors to this frame, and they’re both in the previous one too, but widely separated there. equidistant on either side of the heron; marching on a few dozen meters allowed them to line up and give an impression of more colors than were really visible, as well as putting a splash of color right alongside the heron. Cropping tighter enhanced this considerably, and then shamelessly, I darkened the frame a little and boosted saturation just a tad to really bring it home, but I had also been shooting with the settings for high contrast in the camera, trying to handle the bright sunlight, and those reduce contrast and saturation. If you’re worried about such wanton editing, go read this.

Then I rounded a small point, drawing closer and producing entirely different lighting and effects.

backlit great blue heron Ardea herodias with sunlight reflections from water
No fall colors now; not a lot of color at all, really, because of shooting almost directly into the sun. And I’ll tell you a little secret: I boosted saturation by the maximum amount it would go in GIMP, just to illustrate that there was virtually none to begin with. As a comparison, the previous shot was boosted by “9” on the slider (percentage, perhaps; who knows? It’s unlabeled,) but this one was boosted by “100,” right against the stops – there just wasn’t much to boost.

Almost immediately afterward, the heron said, “Screw this” (or non-words to that effect) and flew off. I had been shooting at 300mm and the above image was slightly cropped, so it’s not like I was particularly close, but that’s how this specific heron behaves – not at all like the cooperative egret from a few weeks back. Back and forth goes the luck, which is profound, I know.

On this date 49

Al Denelsbeck

So, on December 2nd I’ve shot…

nothing
… nothing. Not a damn thing, at least in the digital era. I can’t account for the slides because they’re not dated for the day taken, and my database never carried that info, so maybe I’ve shot something on this date, in years past, but can’t prove it. I could easily have shot something in digital or film, too, but never thought they were worth keeping and discarded them. So I won’t definitively say that I’ve done no shooting on this date, but I can’t prove otherwise – I have no alibi, is what I’m saying. Do with that what you will.

But it’s the slow period, and I did shoot a tiny handful of images on both the 1st and the 3rd of the month, so we’ll take a quick peek at one of those, shamefully admitting that this is cheating and I’m disqualifying myself from whatever competition is taking place. Tough noogies.

unremembered spillway falls somewhere in North Carolina
old silo in middle of road in middle of town, somewhere in North CarolinaSo the image above was taken during a photo outing that Jim Kramer had planned, where he also did all of the driving and navigating, and because of this, I have no goddamn idea where it is. Well, that’s not entirely true, because I know it was within 75 klicks and at least westward from here, but not much more than that. And I’m not sure Jim would even recognize it from the photo above, so I included one of the few others that I got on the same day, not too far away, of a solitary silo right smack in the middle of the road, pretty much in the middle of town too, but even the one horse died because the silo no longer has a roof and the silage is all moldy now. Someone might recognize this, but seriously, this was in the boondocks, and North Carolina is good at boondocks – maybe not up to Alabama’s level (if “up” is the right word here,) but pretty boondocky all the same. I’m a little surprised the silo is still standing, because I imagine it’s a prime target for drunk drivers and drunk driving has to be, like, the only Friday night activity in the town, but as of 2005, there it was. Somewhere.

Just levels

Al Denelsbeck

November has been quite a frustrating month for me, so I’m more than happy to see the end of it – except, there’s absolutely no reason to believe a) that such circumstances are influenced by, well, anything; b) that the arbitrary demarcation of the ‘month end’ means anything more than a simplification of our mental categorizing; and c) that even if either of these weren’t true, that the last day of the month could influence those things that I find frustrating. Which means all of these are decidedly abstract impressions, whereupon we segue into our routine month-end post. You didn’t believe we could go this deep, didya?

Anyway, we have two today, shot nearby during two of the very-brief attempts at photographing anything in the past few weeks – aside from the late fall dearth of subject matter, we also have the other pursuits that I’ve been engaged with that sapped (uh, are sapping,) too much of my time, thus the dearth of posts as well. So it goes; I’m still riding the wave from October ;-)

old fencepost in water with reflection
It’s not exactly hard to determine what this is, but the water was nice and smooth and I wanted that subtle little spider in there – please don’t tell me you missed it. Actually, it’s only the reflection of the spider, though the spider itself is actually visible, it’s against the complicated background of the stump (actually I think it’s an old fencepost, which makes this a fencepostpost,) and very hard to make out at this resolution, but if you want to try, go for it.

Come to think of it, this is a fencepostpost squared, because that also serves as the setting for the next entry.

unidentified fungus atop signpost in tight macro
Whoops, no, I lie – this is a signpost instead. Well, it’s the weird fungus atop a signpost, which itself is not visible, that I shot wide open in natural light with the Mamiya 80mm macro and extension tube, because I hadn’t bothered to grab the macro lighting rig. Which would have made it better, to be sure, because depth of field at f4 isn’t exactly overwhelming. I could also have boosted contrast, but that would have been cheating. I mean, even more than the specific cropping and resizing that I did for this post. Listen, don’t ask me to explain my ethics, and you won’t get so confused.

I have a coupla fartsy shots from the same outings (or at least one of them) that will be along when I finally get a smidgen more free time that is not spent on other projects. Continue monitoring this particular radio frequency, as they say, which makes no sense at all but I didn’t make it up…

On the negative side 9

Al Denelsbeck

long exposure of night sky over Indian River Lagoon
It’s been a while since the last dedicated negative post – just hadn’t found too much to scan and/or comment about, but then I ran across this old scan and decided to post it. Of course, if you’re seeing this in the slow winter months, that means I realized I’d need more post fodder for then/now and shelved it until then (it’s August as I type this initial bit.)

Obviously, what we have here is a long exposure of the night sky, but this dates from back about 2003-2004, the Florida days, and some cheap-ass film that someone unloaded on me for experiments, so this was one of them. Lots of negative films don’t handle night exposures very well, and this was no exception, as can be ascertained by the grainy appearance, but there’s an overriding reason behind that. Night exposures tend to be mostly blue in tone, and weakly at that, but negative films capture things in inverse colors – thus, “negative” (it does not mean they’re pessimistic, necessarily.) So when the primary light is blue, this is being captured in the yellow layer of the film emulsion, the inverse of blue, and largely not at all in the other color layers.

But wait, there’s more. Light is, of course, not perfectly ‘blue,’ and there really is no such thing. There’s also no such thing as emulsions that will only capture a specific wavelength; mostly, it’s silver halide that’s sensitive to any light, embedded in a gelatin layer that filters out everything but blue (but then, when developed into a negative, will be rendered yellow anyway.) Below this on the film sits a layer that blocks blue light, so it will not try to expose the green or red layers beneath. The exact color registers of each of these (as well as sometimes, the number of each) is what gives each film its inherent color registers.

And since this yellow layer sits on top, it is the one most easily damaged by handling, not at all helped by commercial film processing which, more often than not, doesn’t bother with any hardeners that will make the negatives tougher. I could easily have taken this particular roll to a pro lab in town, which probably would have done a better job than the local drugstore, but the local drugstore charged $1.98 to develop into negatives without prints, and as I said this was an experimental roll.

Overall, the experiment came out worse than intended. The humidity was just a little too high, the haze blocking out the stars near the horizon and reflecting too much of the city lights – actually, multiple cities, or at least mid-size towns. A couple of stray aircraft left extraneous trails in the sky. And the ghost on the bench was barely captured on film at all.

Oh, you didn’t see it? Yeah, it’s there, just barely, if you look close. Legend has it that the ghost appeared only on certain nights near midnight, so I locked open the shutter and let the camera sit there recording.

Okay, you know that’s me on the bench – I just didn’t stay put long enough for the exposure time. This was, in fact, one of the experiments that helped me pin down how long it really should be, to leave a distinct but still transparent human-shaped shadow. Rough guideline: about 3/4 of the exposure time. It’s admittedly a lot easier to experiment in digital – just, not exactly accurately, because the LCD on the back of the camera won’t give you a viable idea of the relative exposure, especially when viewed in the dark.

By the way, the string of lights on the left side is the causeway bridge across the Indian River Lagoon, which is the body of water in the foreground, the sound between the barrier islands (background) and the mainland (where the bench is.) The bright rectangle to the right is some hotel.

Were I more motivated, I’d use those star trails to get a rough idea of what season it was, or at least determine what constellations are visible; I don’t know what time the photo was taken, so I could only get a rough idea from the constellations, even though I know what direction I was aiming. The planes were still active, so I’m supposing not too late (likely before ten PM, certainly before eleven,) but it was dark enough so I’m pretty certain it wasn’t summer. Hmmm…

On this date 48

Al Denelsbeck

unidentified shield bug in extreme closeup
As the harddrive woes continue, with even less progress than reported last time (yes, I backslid a bit – don’t ask,) we still have our weekly post of photos taken on this very date in years past, sure to engender those warm fuzzy feelings, especially with subjects like this. Last week opened with an image taken while visiting North Carolina in 2003, and this one is the same, the tail-end of the same trip. I was experimenting freely and had attached an Olympus 50mm f1.2 lens backwards onto the fixed lens of the Sony F-717, which when zoomed out to ‘telephoto’ lengths (i.e., notably longer than a ‘normal’ view) would produce some serious macro magnification – albeit with some serious shortcomings too, like the egregious distortion seen around the edges. I haven’t bothered to identify this variety of shield bug/stinkbug, but this was among the first images where I was doing compound eye detail. A few months later on in Florida, same camera and lens setup, I expanded on this a little (a lot.)

And then, nothing at all on this date until 2008.

Cooper's hawk Accipiter cooperii looking chagrined
While working for a wildlife center, we had an outdoor cage for acclimating rehabilitated birds to the outdoors pending release (back when the place actually maintained a rehab program before the idiotic director shitcanned it,) and this Cooper’s hawk (Accipiter cooperii) believed it was getting an easy meal. Accipiters are bird eaters, and the dove we had in the cage was a sitting duck, as it were – except that the hawk hadn’t really registered the wire cage sides. After bouncing off of this abruptly right as it should by all rights have been seizing a slow fat dove in its talons, the hawk retired to an overhanging branch and debriefed itself on what went wrong, giving me a little time to get the camera out. While a few other frames are sharper, I chose this one for the blurred tail, evidence of the hawk settling its feathers, yet giving me the distinct impression of fidgeting in frustration as it peered down at the cage and the unfazed dove. Of course that’s because I was there and witnessing the drama; a viewer seeing this image without exposition is more likely to feel the hawk just spotted its favorite chew toy.

Another four years passes in a flash.

unidentified lady beetle Coccinellidae restrained with petroleum jelly on toothpick and exuding defensive hemolymph
No fartistic merit in this one – this is strictly illustrative, and I took a buttload of frames for the details. I’ve said before, 2012 was a banner year for arthropod photos, and this is some of the reason why: I was illustrating as much as I could of the subjects that I was finding. When studying anything biological, you come across the term aposematic coloration fairly quickly, the bright hues and distinctive contrast that makes a species recognizable and memorable, and this is almost always coupled with some kind of defensive mechanism (or on occasion, to mimic another species that has such.) The bright-orange-with-spots traits of the various lady beetles (Coccinellidae) are no exception, but I had to research whether this actually was aposematic coloration, because I’d never heard of nor encountered any such defense. But it’s visible here, and what I was illustrating: lady beetles can exude their own blood (technically hemolymph) from their joints, and apparently this is pretty distasteful stuff. That’s the yellow blog you see here to the left, out on the end of a foreleg and at the tip of the lady beetle’s mouthparts; the harsher lighting (before I was using the softboxes) and the odd angle make the details a little hard to discern, but if it helps, there’s a white triangle on the beetle’s head with a compound eye shining just below it. Since they never seemed to use this defensive action when I was handling them, I got to see it when doing underside detail with the method of putting a small blob of petroleum jelly on the tip of a toothpick and touching this to the beetle’s back (elytra, the wing covers.) This effectively and harmlessly restrained the beetle while allowing me to photograph the underside, and it showed its displeasure by squeezing out some hemolymph for me. And actually, this is showing a curious action that macro video would have illustrated better: when the blood-squirting wasn’t working, the beetle began mouthing the drops, which turned darker and more viscous and eventually fell off, no longer sticky. What, exactly, happened I have yet to determine – mostly because I forget all about such things until I find the photos again.

But never mind that. What does 2013 hold?

dired basil flowers against sky
Not much, actually; the only photos I shot were of these dried basil flowers. We’d had a huge crop of sweet basil, all grown in the garden from a single seed packet, that had been used all summer long for sandwiches and soups and our own pesto, and in the fall I did a few photos of the dried flowers before harvesting them for their seeds, which are remarkably aromatic (but only reminiscent of basil leaves themselves.) These were dutifully planted at the new house the next spring, and produced not one single plant; perhaps we had a hybrid variety or something. Maybe the bees at the old house sucked. Whatever – seed packets are cheap, and while I’ve had very mixed luck with a lot of them, basil seems to be dependable, and we like it, so it’s a regular planting here, and appears in enough of my photos too. I was hoping to actually see the seeds within from this angle, with the help of the flash, but failed. So I have a handful of dried basil flower photos in my stock for anyone that needs them. Spread the word.

Not a reflection

Al Denelsbeck

green iguana Iguana iguana plotting something dastardlyThe blog posts have been slower than intended for the past few days, but this is not a reflection of reality – you know, meatspace – because that’s been far busier than I would have liked. You certainly recall when I mentioned my chagrin with working on computers a few weeks back, and that has continued, since I have three harddrives on my workhorse computer and I have now gotten to the third, which in Windows terms would actually be the first, or the boot drive. Linux doesn’t assign any order to drives, but this does mean that manually identifying them is almost necessary, especially when multiple drives are the same size.

I’ll spare you the history, which spans several days, and simply say that using an older motherboard put up a lot more problems than I anticipated, since it required a different format for the drive partitions and that single stumbling block took a hell of a long time to detect – not to mention that I then had to split the boot drive because of it (which means make the computer think that one harddrive was actually multiple drives.) At present, I have installed an updated version of Linux on the new boot drive, which is indeed working and booting as intended, but now am in the process of ensuring I have all of the software and accoutrements necessary. This takes time, because the old drive is/was also a boot drive, so they both can’t be connected at the same time.

To that end, I’ve been avoiding any tasks that would require copying information over between the old and new boot drive, photo work and blog posts among them. I have some more post ideas in the queue, but they’re shelved until the system is working more-or-less properly – so we have this ancient photo from the depths of time that’s been sitting in the blog folder waiting for the right moment to utilize that expression. This isn’t that time, but you’re reading an, “I’m still here,” throwaway post so it got elected. Without dispute, even. It was one of several iguanas that lived in my office (mostly at different times) back when I worked at an animal shelter, so 2005-ish? Whatever. She’s actually propped on a branch to be closer to the heating lamp, but the toes (and of course the reptilian expression) spelled out something else to me, which is why the image is named, “Exxxcellent.” Don’t make me explain that reference. Putting in the HTML image description also allowed me to use the word, “dastardly,” and that makes me a little happier this morning.

Regardless of my peculiar pleasures, more is on the way. Patience.

On this day (a whisker of success)

Al Denelsbeck

In the previous post, I mentioned attempting in vain to capture any of the Leonid meteors nine years ago, ending with, “Leave it to me to chase meteors on the colder nights…” And since it was 4°C at 4 AM this morning, guess what I decided to attempt again?

The primary difference being, this time I was moderately successful!

But first off, the false alarm.

a satellite passing through during Leonids meteor storm
I saw a small handful of meteors this morning, mostly where the camera wasn’t aimed, but noticed one that might have made it into the frame. As I closed the shutter, I took a quick chimp at the LCD preview and saw this lovely stripe across the photo, notably not where I’d seen the meteor, yet pleased that I at least caught this one, if not two. Except, on returning home and examining the images that I’d captured, I realized that this and the following frame had matching lines across them, meaning I hadn’t captured a meteor (which will typically last less than a second and will never exist across multiple frames,) but a satellite instead. In this case, it was the Cosmos 2058, a Russian spy satellite – Stellarium will allow you to determine a lot of these, so if you haven’t downloaded it yet, why the hell not?

But I said I was successful, and I was. Not hugely, but this is a bona fide meteor.

meteor near Orion during Leonids meteor shower
That’s Sirius at lower left, with Orion showing at lower right, just to help orient you. I never saw this one, but during exposures I may often be looking around at other portions of the sky, seeing if any areas appear more active. I was experimenting with high ISOs on the 7D to shorten the exposure times and thus the star trails, but this means a) a hell of a lot more noise and blotchiness from the sky, and b) a lot more frames to maximize the chance of capturing a meteor. Nonetheless we have a classic meteor, showing the ‘tapered’ appearance that indicates that it flared to a peak brightness and faded – twice, it seems.

And then again, while the camera was still aimed in the same direction (which was the darkest sky direction in this region, the farthest from any cities that throw up too much light pollution.)

Another meteor near Orion during Leonids meteor shower
This one was almost nicely aligned with the previous, except these weren’t consecutive frames, so I’m confident that I captured two meteors here. According to science boffins, most meteors are about the size of a grain of sand, and most of the light they produce isn’t the meteor itself melting as it hits the atmosphere, but instead the air reacting to the velocity of the particle. Still, there are occasional color changes from meteors of different types, though I have yet to see one myself, much less capture one in camera.

By the way, the regularly-scheduled meteor storms are all the result of Earth passing through the stream of debris left behind by the passage of comets; in the case of the Leonids, it’s comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. They get their name from the apparent point of origin for most of the meteors, which is the ‘leading edge’ of the Earth as it enters the debris cloud, so the larger percentage of meteors seems to emanate from that portion of sky (radiant.) Thus the Leonids indicate that the radiant is the constellation Leo. However, they can appear in all directions, pulled by Earth’s gravity or simply catching the atmosphere as the planet passes alongside, and I’ve seen them traveling all over the place during busy storms, including almost directly into the radiant, so concentrating on just one portion of the sky might mean missing some cool ones.

I caught one satellite actually crossing the sky, trundling along with barely visible progress, and re-aimed the camera for a specific exposure. In a couple other cases, what I took to be meteors when examining the photos back home turned out to have paths in consecutive frames. The one below almost fooled me, because it shows a flare, but it took too long to cross the sky.

satellite ALOS Daichi crossing sky near Sirius, showing faint flare
See that brighter middle? Yeah, that should indicate a meteor, but it doesn’t. Instead, this is likely the satellite rotating and catching an angle to reflect the sun, given some weight when I used Stellarium to plot the satellite itself.

screen capture from Stellarium showing satellite identified as ALOS/Daichi
It’s pretty easy: open Stellarium, and use the progress arrows to reverse the Earth’s rotational effect until the clock approaches the time stamp of the photo (provided that you remembered to reset the camera’s clock for DST, which I’d forgotten.) Watch for a ‘star’ moving too fast or in the wrong direction, and click on it to see what it is. ALOS stands for Advanced Land Observation Satellite, and as you can see from the photo at that link, it’s covered in reflective foil; easy enough to catch the sun as the sunrise approached.

Through the small patch of trees to the east (this being a boat launch area on Jordan Lake,) I could see an inordinatley bright spot, and since the airport lies in that direction I suspected a plane, but it had no strobes and wasn’t apparently moving. After a minute, I’d confirmed it was Venus rising, and a bit later I re-aimed the camera and did a time exposure through the trees, flooded with the rains from a recent tropical storm.

Venus rising behind flooded trees
The sky was already lightening with the coming dawn, and I was starting to lose sight of some of the stars overhead, so after a few more frames I packed it up. Maybe I’ll return again tonight to give it another go, but for now, I can bask ever-so-slightly in the success of finally capturing a few (admittedly unimpressive) meteors.

On this date 47

Al Denelsbeck

Just four (well, four-ish) this time – could have had a lot more, because I’ve shot plenty on this date, but some were repetitive, and some have already been featured in posts. We’ll start with 2003.

extreme closeup od dandelion blossom and ant
At this point in time, I was living in Florida but up visiting with Jim Kramer for a week, while he still lived in North Carolina. This was playing around with the macro settings on the Sony F-717 camera of his, some months before he mailed it down to me to use for a bit before it was sold off (he’d purchased the upgraded model.) I don’t think I knew the ant was actually in the photo – I was concentrating on keeping the center in focus.

The we jump eight years forward to 2011.

time exposure of starfield around Polaris
Ten years previous to this, I’d witnessed the fabulous Leonids meteor shower but captured no photos due to using the wrong film for such an endeavor, and this was the first time that I’d tried it in digital, this being with the Canon Digital Rebel, or 300D, or DReb as I called it. I remember it being a cold night and the batteries gave way after about an hour, during which I’d only tripped five frames with the digital camera, capturing nothing; I was also out there with the Mamiya 645 medium format (film) camera with Fuji Provia 100, which did a much better job that the film from a decade earlier yet revealed no meteors itself. This is a six-minute exposure (at f5.6, ISO 100) with Polaris in the frame, the focal point of the star trails since it sits directly above Earth’s north pole and so the rotation of the planet causes all of the stars to track in a circle, except for one.

[You won’t ever get a complete circle in a photo unless you’re very close to the poles themselves during local winter, when the sun never actually rises, but even then the horizon can brighten enough to ruin the 24-hour exposure needed, so…]

2015, be the year we be visitin’ now, and a bizarre composite to illustrate something.

two views of reflections in a frog's eye
I combined two nearly-consecutive images to show the different reflections visible in this green frog’s (Lithobates clamitans) eye. You see, I was testing out a new softbox option after I’d fried the old Sunpak FP38 flat panel flash doing something stupid (like hooking up a 12-volt power source to a system intended for 6.) One thing that I lacked with the old flash was portability, and I was experimenting with a folding reflector assembly on the Metz 40MZ-3i, so one of these images was with flash, one without, which should be clear enough. But both show the reflector, kinda. In the top image, you can see the round reflecting panel with a rectangular highlight, the distinct reflection of the flash head itself, but also the flash head off to the side, aimed indirectly so barely visible – and the matte black arms holding the reflector itself. All of this was acceptable, but could be improved, and mostly, I didn’t like the weight and horrible balance of the Metz. In the bottom photo, the shape of the arms and reflector are more obvious, silhouetted against the tree branches off to the side, while the camera itself sits more centered in the eye. These were taken in the backyard pond – well, the frog was in the pond; the camera and I were simply alongside it.

We’ll stay vaguely thematic as we advance a year to 2016.

four painted turtle Chrysemys picta basking on logs in November
Going through Mason Farm Biological Reserve that day, a quartet of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) were posed fetchingly on a pair of logs in good light, so of course I had to photograph them. Notably, three of these photos show that November can be quite nice, climate-wise, and the fourth shows no indication of temperature at all, though I can tell you that the tripod had frost on it when I packed up for the night (we’re talking about the starfield shot now.) Leave it to me to chase meteors on the colder nights…

Tell me why…

Al Denelsbeck

… I get up to things like this.

So, okay, I got two different detailed photos of a gibbous moon, one waxing, one waning, taken 10 days apart. And of course, at different heights in the sky, so angled differently, as shown here in the original orientations.

waxing gibbous and waning gibbous moons
Now, some landmarks. If you look at the left version, there is a dark almost-circular, almost-centered spot in the visible face, which is Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity – directly beneath it is Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed. Now we turn to the right version, and those two Mares are both sitting on the terminator, the line of shadow, rotated quite a bit – Mare Tranquillitatis is half in shadow. We’ll come back to this in a sec.

One of the things that I wanted to show was that full moons are usually boring, while not-full moons are more dramatic, showing greater detail and geology. To that end, I chose a particular spot visible in both photos and overlapped them in an animated gif (pronounced, “MOO-vee”) that morphed between the two.

animated gif showing how shadows define detailsFor the most part, it works quite well, especially when you pay attention to that large crater with the prominent central peak (Theophilus.) With the light almost dead on to it, it appears as a faint circle, only revealed as a sharp crater by having some shadows to throw. This, by the way, shows the Apollo 11 landing site, just about centered in the frame. No, you’re not going to see anything (especially not with a 1000mm focal length) – Theophilus is 100km across, slightly less than the width of New Jersey.

You may notice that some of the craters don’t line up perfectly, and this is evidence of a particular trait of the moon, which is libration. The moon is in a synchronous orbit, mostly; it always has the same side facing Earth even as it orbits around Earth, trying to hide the flowers behind its back. But it’s not perfect, and thus ‘wobbles’ a little, which is called libration. It’s not really enough to notice from naked eye observations, and even detailed photos won’t illustrate it very well – until you do something silly like trying to overlap two photos of the moon in different phases.

Or even worse, animating it.

animated gif showing waxing and waning gibbous phases of the moonIt took no small amount of playing around to line these up this way, believe me: first resizing the two photos by the same amount, then rotating a bit at a time to get the poles to match (near as can be determined by the shadows,) as well as shifting by small increments to get the overlap this good so the sphere, never actually visible, nonetheless appears complete – and realizing that, in ten days, the moon had also progressed enough along its elliptical orbit of Earth to change size a little, requiring re-scaling one of the images. The result looks pretty damn well like the progression of the shadow – except the details of the moon itself all shift enormously, well illustrated by the changing position of those two Mares. Or you can see someone else’s animation here.

This was, in fact, a major hurdle in doing that first gif above, because that spot was rotated further around the sphere from one photo to the other, warping and compressing the positions of the craters, and I had to do a lot of fiddling in the editor to get them as close as they are – not recommended to anyone who doesn’t have time and patience. It’s one thing to emulate the perspective change when you try to make text look like it’s on the oblique surface of a cooler, but another to cope with the shift along the surface of a sphere.

And to provide another illustration, we’ll take those two images and instead line them up with prominent surface features.

two gibbous moon phases overlapped and pinned on Plato crater
We already know the poles are pretty close, from the uniformity of the shadowed regions, so here’s what happens when you chose the crater Plato (indicated in yellow) as the anchor point. That’s not even close enough for government work.

How about if we use Mare Tranquillitatis and the landing site, the location and orientation of the first gif above?

two gibbous moon phases overlapped and pinned on Theophilus crater
That’s a hard nope, too. It should be clear that no amount of shifting or rotating will bring the two versions into a viable overlap.

I will note that some of the apparent shift is due to the tilted orbits of both Earth and moon, meaning the phase shadows will not line up perfectly because the sun isn’t dead on the moon’s equator; just like the seasonal changes in the angle of the sun on Earth, the moon undergoes a certain shift as well. Basically, all of this means that you shouldn’t really try to overlap different moon images and expect them to line up. But this is the kind of silly shit I do sometimes…

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