Highlights

Al Denelsbeck2 Comments

I mean, not terribly high, but these were from yesterday’s outing, which was far quieter than it should have been.

Going along the edge of New Hope Creek in Duke Forest yesterday, we heard a plop! not far away, which I took to be a turtle abandoning its basking spot on a log at our approach. Moments later, there was a PLOP! from the same direction, telling us that another had dropped into the water from a greater height. We found the branch, and a third basking turtle was still in view:

unidentified mud or musk turtle basking on branch
This is either a variety of mud or musk turtle, I’m not bothering to try and determine which; suffice to say they’re the size and shape of a hand grenade, 10-12 cm in length. This is important.

unidentified mud or musk turtle basking on branch, apparently a ways from the water
I’ve seen these guys climb a decent distance from the water, unlike the sliders and painted turtles that are so prevalent around here, which prefer either half-submerged trunks or shallow riverbanks. Mud and musk turtles like to get a bit higher, for reasons unknown.

unidentified mud or musk turtle basking on branch, roughly two meters above the water
A lot higher – that’s about 2 meters or so from the water’s surface. I suspected this one was asleep, since it never reacted to our presence, but looking at the images afterward, it appeared quite aware of our presence – just reluctant to give up its hard-earned perch, perhaps.

The banks of the creek showed plenty of evidence that the water level and flow had been considerably higher recently, and may have scoured the creek of most of the prime basking spots. There were numerous logjams on the banks well out of the water, and even a lot of the rocks on the banks were uneven and loose – it might have been one hell of a flow at one point. This may have been responsible, too, for the scarcity of water snakes in an area that typically featured lots of them. In fact, during the entire outing, we only saw one:

large northern water snake Nerodia sipedon sipedon hiding deep in hollow among rocks
This northern water snake (Nerodia sipedon sipedon) had been out on the rocks as we approached, but quickly sought shelter – I only got a couple frames as it slipped out of sight, enough to positively identify it, but then found it by crouching down and peering into the dark crevices on the opposite side of the rock that it had disappeared beneath, with the help of my omnipresent pocket flashlight. It took a few frames to get the camera flash in there enough, and focus is slightly off, but I got the face at least. This was a big specimen, and had no reason to be shy at all.

Or, maybe it did. You can see how the scales on the closet coil to us seem stretched out, and this might be evidence of a recent large meal which the snake was trying to peacefully digest. The nights have started getting cooler now, so snakes will be out at least in the morning to absorb the warmth of the sunlight for energy to digest their meals, which is why people start seeing them out on the roads and rocks and sidewalks in the spring and fall – during high summer, the nights never get cold enough to warrant needing the extra energy. As always, just leave them be – they have no interest in doing anything to anybody over 15cm tall.

Suddenly, something

Al Denelsbeck

All of these came from various times on Monday, which turned out to be far more productive than the outing that was scheduled for that day, which was postponed until Tuesday, or that outing. It was even more productive than the trip to the neighborhood pond immediately before it. Weird how things turn out sometimes.

Here’s the rundown. Returning from the pond with virtually nothing to show for it, I passed The Jungle, the patch at the front of Walkabout Estates that holds many plants, some of which get out of control easily. One of those is the Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica,) which I noticed was being visited by a snowberry clearwing moth (Hemaris diffinis.)

snowberry clearwing moth Hemaris diffinis visiting flowers of Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica
The black legs pin down the species among the two Hemaris variants in the area. Because the flowers and vines were so clustered and overlapping, autofocus was more frustrating than helpful, and I switched to manual – not a lot better, but I could rough-focus and then lean closer or farther to try and keep the hyperactive moth sharp. It failed more often than it worked, but it worked enough to get a few useful frames.

snowberry clearwing moth Hemaris diffinis deep within flower of Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica
I think the Hemaris moths like the honeysuckle better than the hummingbirds that they mimic, but I like them both so I’m happy to get shots of either, even when I’m trying to get a lot more pics of hummingbirds on natural subjects rather than the feeders.

Soon enough, an eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) came over for the same flowers.

eastern tiger swallowtail Papilio glaucus feeding from flowers of Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica
Funny, I planted a bunch of seeds this spring, again, for wildflowers that would attract such subjects, none of which appeared, but the invasive honeysuckle, which I’ve spent a lot of time yanking out of there because they strangle other plants, are garnering all of the attention. There’s a lesson here if I choose to accept it, which I do not. For shit’s sake, at least let me get some native cardinal flowers growing, would ya?

One of my frames had a strange effect.

eastern tiger swallowtail Papilio glaucus feeding from flowers of Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica with blurred snowberry clearwing moth Hemaris diffinis partially blocking it
When the shutter is tripping, the reflex mirror within the camera flips up and the viewfinder blacks out momentarily, so I often don’t realize what just happened – in this case, I simply noticed that the Hemaris had appeared by a nearby flower cluster, unaware until unloading the memory card that it had partially blocked the swallowtail just as I got the frame. Immediately afterward, I reframed to get them both.

eastern tiger swallowtail Papilio glaucus and snowberry clearwing moth Hemaris diffinis both feeding from flowers of Japanese honeysuckle Lonicera japonica
This lasted until the Hemaris got a little too close to the swallowtail and was chased off by a rude flip of the latter’s wings. It’s funny how different arthropod species can communicate.

Now, on passing The Jungle on my way out to the pond, I’d seen an unexplained movement of the vines, watching it for a few moments and finding no reason behind it, then moving on. But I’d suspected it was an anole, and on this return pass, I saw the same thing. This time I watched more carefully, and eventually got a glimpse of the culprit.

juvenile Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis barely peeking out among clusters of leaves
See it? Yeah, this gives you a great idea of why I was having a hard time myself, but I had the slight advantage of noticing movement, provided I was looking in exactly the right spot (or my peripheral vision had my back, which it does quite often.) We’ll go in closer.

juvenile Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis betrayed by its dark eye
It was right there in the center of the frame, but here, closer cropped and with its dark eye providing some attention-getting contrast, it’s a bit more obvious. I believe I’d seen this one a few days earlier on the oak-leaf hydrangea that shares The Jungle, but this time the anole was slinking around among and within the leaves, barely coming into open view at all – it definitely had no intention of being spotted, making my job more difficult.

juvenile Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis momentarily appearing in the sun
This was as far as it got into the open, and it lasted for a couple seconds at best. Still, I’d been seeing few signs of any anoles recently, and I was going through withdrawal, so I got my fix chasing this one for a little while.

That was all mid-morning. But come early evening, I was out front talking to The Girlfriend and spotted someone else, trotting back inside to get the camera.

juvenile Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis perched on seed pods of hosta plant
Another Carolina anole, and perched once again on the seed pods of the same hosta plant where I witnessed it every night for a week or so (immediately upon posting that, of course, it stopped – jinx!) I spent a few minutes tracking this one within the plant, while it slinked along trying to be inconspicuous.

juvenile Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis on hosta plant showing evidence of scarring on head
This close view allowed me to see what appeared to be scarring on the head, likely evidence of territorial battles – which was curious because I wouldn’t have imagined that they would engage in such at this size. Now, this was less than two meters from the stomping ground of the juvenile five-lined skink, so maybe? But skinks tend to be terrestrial, climbing broader branches at best, while anoles definitely prefer leaves and foliage; they don’t cross paths too often. Still, something happened.

Well after sundown, I did a routine patrol of the front area, expecting to find this little anole perched asleep on the seed pods again. There was no sign, but the Japanese maple two meters off was serving as a bunk instead.

juvenile Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis asleep on leaves of Japanese maple
I thought this was the same one, but again, after unloading the memory card, I noticed that this one’s head was devoid of scarring – it was a different specimen. Considering that the previous one had seemed rather small to me, I’m leaning towards this one being the same as the one I’d witnessed a month previously, and the scarred one being newer/younger, perhaps chased to the hosta by this one. Can’t say for sure, but you can believe it if you like.

The following day, I once again found the scarred one on the hosta, so I suspect it had indeed slept there, but likely buried deep within the leaves out of sight. I tried again before I typed this (Tuesday night,) finding the unscarred one on the Japanese maple again and no sign of the scarred one, but the hosta is thick and has plenty of invisible areas down deeper, so not surprising.

But back on Monday night, I did a few frames of a Chinese mantis on the same maple, then turned to go check out The Jungle, to see if I could find the anole that had been there – I’d found one sleeping on the leaves like last year, just once earlier in the summer, and never saw any sign of it again, but I keep checking periodically. However, this time my path was blocked.

eastern cottontail Sylvilagus floridanus sitting complacently in yard
This eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) was maybe four meters away, in plain sight in the middle of the lawn, and I’d never noticed it, nor scared it off while I went around the tree firing off frames of the anole and mantis. I adjusted the flash for this image, then let it be – if it hadn’t scampered off by now, I was going to let it forage in peace. We went close to two months during the heatwave-drought with practically no growth from the lawn (or anything else,) and the pickings were slim for these guys, so now that some decent rains had caused the lawn to flourish again, I was going to let it get what it could.

Instead, I went out back to see what was happening there, and found this specimen.

newly adult Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis on Japanese maple
That’s the first adult Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) that I’ve found this year, though I found another Tuesday night too. I knew it was getting to be about that time. The curious thing about this one was, the eyes weren’t fully dark even though it was well into the night now. Typically, this means that it’s about to molt, but it’s already an adult, or final instar – it’s not going to molt again. And I handled this one gently to get it out in the open for the pics, and knew that it had not recently molted either – those wings are fully dried and settled, so at least a few hours past that point. Curious.

I’d let it be and started looking for other things, then suddenly thought, Hey, wait! I’d had other egg cases in the yard this spring, some of them potentially from European mantises. I’d better check. And so returned for a couple more frames with the crucial identifier visible.

newly adult Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis displaying inside area of foreleg where European markings would be found
A slight nudge and a shift in my position was all it took to get the identifying image. The forelegs are spread here, the left one pointing directly towards the camera, but it’s the right one we’re looking at; there is no dark spot in the ‘armpit’ which denotes the European mantis. Nope, definitely Chinese. The one that I found the following night, this time in The Jungle again, was the same. I thought I might have spotted a juvenile earlier this summer, but so far have not confirmed this yet. We’ll see, I suppose.

But all in all, those were enough finds for a single day, and helped make up for things being so slow in the past few weeks.

Just once, part 34

Al Denelsbeck

living sand dollar order Clypeasteroida beginning to bury itself
Another example of time just slipping away, because I remember the trip where I obtained this image, and would not have said that it was eight years ago (tomorrow, actually.) Then again, my beach trips have been scarce recently, ‘recently’ meaning, ‘in the past several years,’ so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Off the ocean side of the middle of Jekyll Island, Georgia, the calm beaches there played host to countless sand dollars (order Clypeasteroida,) able to be found by gently running your fingers just below the surface of the sand just offshore in shallow water, and we found plenty of them, of all sizes. I collected one in the macro aquarium that I’d thought to bring with me, and did a photo session in the bathroom of the motel late at night while everyone else was asleep. Unfortunately, the water hadn’t had the several hours needed to let the turbidity fully settle out, so the specimen goes softer with the greater amount of water between my camera and itself. It was still enough to see the tiny little ‘feet’ that it uses to bury itself in the sand, or alternately to stand upright (on edge) in the currents while feeding. These feet could also be felt moving gently within your hand if you held onto one for more than a minute or so.

What I find amusing is that, as familiar as we all are with the off-white skeletal remains of sand dollars, their appearance while living is what a child might imagine, based on the skeleton – just put a thin layer of flesh over it all and that’s what it looks like, right? And in this case, it is. Except perhaps for the color, which even I find a little odd – I definitely expected ‘sand,’ followed by brownish or something. Not olive.

I think we had two other trips to Jekyll planned since this was taken; one got canceled because of a hurricane, and the other we cut short after only a day because of another hurricane, only this one was aimed directly at our home in NC rather than at Jekyll, but we thought it would be better to be back there in case power got knocked out or the petsitter couldn’t get by. We did decide not to plan such trips for hurricane season from then on, though.

Sorting finds n+9

Al Denelsbeck

First off, I know it’s going to be hard to maintain posts for a few weeks, so they may become sparse, but they will be back up to normal after some stuff goes down – they might even increase in number. Well, I mean they always increase in number, because there’s only one or two posts that I’ve actually taken down, so the count keeps climbing. What I mean is, the average number of posts per week might increase a bit. But we’ll get to that later.

Right now, we’re back to posting a few images that I reminded myself of when doing the photo sort into their appropriate categories – I really haven’t been taking much, and most of what I have pursued has been sunspots, monitoring how they’re progressing. But there’s an outing scheduled for tomorrow, so we’ll see what that might produce.

The first three came from the beginning of the month, from the Science Museum of Virginia, one of those places that has a big vaulted rotunda that features a pendulum; I first saw this in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Given a free hinge, i.e., the ability to swing in any direction, a large pendulum will slowly change its direction of swing as the Earth rotates, eventually traveling through 360° provided the momentum is enough – precession, in other words. To demonstrate this, such pendulums are ringed with something to knock over periodically, to show that the direction is gradually changing – you should be able to predict roughly when one will get knocked over because it’s an increment of the length of the day. While I was there, I endeavored to try and capture the moment when it did so.

pendulum in Science Museum of Virginia causing pin to wobble
I realized, in watching, that the pins were slightly bottom-weighted on their hinges so it would take a solid strike to topple one, as this one wobbled but returned to upright. The pendulum took about ten seconds to do a full sweep, and I could see that there was a slightly oval component to its swing, because it would miss the pin notably to one side on the return swing.

pendulum in Science Museum of Virginia almost knocking pin over
Another pass, another wobble. The pattern of pins toppled were semi-consistent: here, they were facing in towards the center, but at one point they switched to facing outwards instead, indicating how the pendulum would topple them on the outward part of the sweep instead of inward. It was the same for both sides of the circle.

pendulum in Science Museum of Virginia finally knocking pin over
Success! After three passes where the pin righted itself, this time it went down. It took just a little patience and there was only so much time I was going to devote to this since I had other things I should have been doing, but it was much easier than, say, waiting for woodpeckers.

And finally,

newborn five-lined skink Plestiodon fasciatus basking on front steps
This was only a few days ago, and not the first that I’d seen it, but the first that I’d gotten a photo. This is a very young five-lined skink (Plestiodon fasciatus) basking on our front steps, and those bricks are standard size, about 50mm in width, to give you the scale. I honestly don’t know when it hatched, but it was only a week out where I could spot it anyway. It’s not far from where the anole had been found for a while, now mostly vacated – I went for a couple of weeks of not spotting it, worried that it had fallen prey to something, but then found it again a few days ago. Territorial battle? Can’t say, but it’s good to see the little guys anyway.

Shall we play a game?

Al Denelsbeck

I could easily have been doing this as installments over the past, like, year and a half, but if I’d started, the gods of fate probably would have caused it all to peter out quickly. So we’ll have a couple of posts now, after things have played out a bit.

Starting premise: my friend Dan Palmer started talking to me about a new playing card deck that he was creating, similar to one we’d worked on a decade before; he gets the concept down, but it’s up to me (if I choose to do so, which is of course a given,) to do the graphics work. Up front, it all seems simple, but the finer details soon reveal that a lot of thought has to go into things.

Gnomon deck PGC cardTo begin with, we needed background images which in essence were the three primary colors, Red, Green, and Blue, and ideally would be apparent what they were when examined, but not distracting and mostly just being a background color. Within these criteria, however, they could not clash with or disguise the symbols which would lay over top of them, also in those primary colors, which meant that whatever we chose for ‘Blue’ could not be too close to the 16-bit RGB value of 0,0,255, because the symbol would disappear against the background if this was too close. They also could not have any shapes within that might be mistaken for shapes of the symbols and thus make it confusing in any way what the card represented. This might seem like we’re being nit-picky, but it’s easy enough to glance too quickly at a card and make a mistake when you’re involved in playing a game. Not too long into the design process, we realized that the RGB value for Green (0,255,0) was actually too bright to be used, and switched to 20,217,20 instead. The background color decisions kicked back and forth for a short while, and in fact, we ended up switching the Red image after the first test printing of the deck.

Then came the fun of representing two characteristics of the card symbols. One set was Filled (solid,) Partial, and Hollow (outline,) and we played with Partial for a while before settling on a simple diagonal line pattern – easy to be told at a glance even at a distance, difficult to mistake for any other. Note, too, that each of the characteristics had to begin with a unique letter, because they would be represented by such in the card margins and, again, couldn’t be mistaken for any other.

Gnomon deck Triangle cardAlso needed were cards to represent shapes of the symbols without any color at all, trickier that it sounds at first. So, a grey Circle, right? No, because that appears to be a Filled Circle, or even a Hollow one, so we needed a circle without any internal pattern. Eventually, we settled on a curious gradient shadow around the outside of the shape, over top of a starfield background, kind of doubling down on the ‘void’ concept. Because I do things like this, the center of the starfield image is actually the ‘center’ of the Milky Way, or at least the direction that it lies in Sagittarius.

Worst of all were the images to represent True and False, and I’ve even posted about this before. To date, we still haven’t really settled on how to visually represent these without resorting to tired cliches, and without having any misleading shapes or colors in there. For instance, in the running were solar and lunar eclipse photos, but they’re both circular and, in the case of the lunar eclipse, red. At one point I found an image of a nearby tree during a heavy snowstorm and thought the opposite would be in full leaf in high summer (we’ll let you figure out which one would be True,) but searching through my image folders, I found I didn’t have any such matching shot. No problem – it was summer, so I’d go get it right away. Only the tree was dying now and looked terrible. Scratch that.

[What we’re using now is an abstract cloud shot, mostly yellow, and its monochrome counterpart – we have yet to find or create images that seem to indicate “True” and “False” on appearance alone, but that’s why the margins have it spelled out.]

back image of Gnomon playing card deckAmong all of this sits what every designer and commissioned artist has to accommodate: the desires of the client. I submitted countless images for just about every aspect before we settled on what’s in use now, generally starting off with three or four choices but, for some, this went on for a while. Specifically, the image for the card backs was a challenge, since it had to be abstract and non-oriented, not easy to mistake for any of the face images, and not dominated by any one color. Eventually we settled on a sunset clouds grab shot that I actually obtained one evening while the selection process was ongoing. “Green,” however, was intentional manipulation, since Dan is a big fan of ginkgos and I knew he wouldn’t reject that one.

There was one mistake that we made, somewhat unavoidable in the circumstances. We’d done an initial printing of a few decks, and even a couple of very large, demo decks. But then I changed the background image for Red, and it looked fine on both of our monitors, so we sent it off for a larger quantity printing right before the conference. Only to find that the printing wasn’t quite in agreement with what we saw onscreen, which happens fairly often – you should always have proofs done for print jobs, but we were getting these done online, overseas I believe, and there wasn’t time for a proof and then a large order. So the red symbols don’t stand out well enough against the red background – they’re visible, but the contrast is low enough that from a distance they’re far less distinct. Now, we have redundancies built right into the deck: the cards all have identifiers right in the margins as seen above, so gameplay is only slightly hampered, but they could have been better.

There’s still more to the saga (sordid story, tale of horror,) but that will wait for another post. Once again, you can go to the site that we set up for the deck, but it’s terrible right now – we needed it for the conference and didn’t have time to do a full treatment, and still don’t. But it will give you a good idea at least.

Just once, part 33

Al Denelsbeck

common loon Gavia immer cruising past at sunrise
This is one of the few images for this weekly topic that I uploaded, rather than using the images already uploaded from the previous appearance, because I was looking at the very faint pastel colors of the sunrise sky reflected in the water and thought, We need more emphasis on those. This is a common loon (Gavia immer,) taken less than a year ago during a trip to Beaufort, North Carolina (which is pronounced differently from the Beaufort in South Carolina, because.) This one very kindly swam out from its cover on the shoreline of the estuary and passed close by me, and I did my part in holding as still as possible while snapping off frames – this allowed it to swim even closer for more frames. Can I credit this to my experience at being unobtrusive, or simply that the loon wasn’t that concerned and might have done this for anybody? I couldn’t possibly say for sure, so I’ll go with my remarkable abilities.

Now, some years back I’d snagged a red-throated loon, but this was the first and so far only common loon, and I didn’t have the fortune to hear it calling, which is a great sound (unlike the loons you hear in singles bars and such.) I really have to work on getting more exposure to coastal and estuary kind of subjects…

I didn’t know

Al Denelsbeck

I went out yesterday morning when it was finally clear to take a shot at the Perseids meteors, as well as the aurora if it bothered to show. Same ol’ same ol’ – I saw a couple of small and brief meteors, and captured the barest streaks in images, but not at all worth the effort on either count. It did not help that the humidity was high and cutting down some of the ‘seeing’ for the evening.

But while out there, I watched a bright star rising over the lake, eventually realizing that it was a pair in close proximity, and pretty bright – they reflected well in the water while the air was still.

Mars and Jupiter in close proximity rising over Falls Lake
That’s the two of them center frame, while Pleiades is the cluster to the right (which I tended to keep in the frame, because I had it in my head this was the Pleiades storm and not the Perseids – that’s higher and to the left.) Later that day, I pulled up Stellarium to see what I’d been seeing and discovered that it was Jupiter and Mars in close conjunction – and that they would be in even closer conjunction this morning. How did I not hear about this?

But before we go, we’ll take a full resolution look at that frame.

full resolution inset of frame with Mars and Jupiter rising, and a very small meteor streak
Most of the streaks – the ones all going the same way – are simply because this was a 30-second exposure and that’s how far they move because of Earth’s rotation. But the other little streak that isn’t in sync is a meteor, one that I never saw and likely wouldn’t have even if I’d been looking right at it, since it was way too short.

So, yes, I did get out this morning and chase the pair again, this time when they were roughly a moon’s width apart in the sky (our moon, not any of the others.)

Mars and Jupiter in close conjunction, showing the four Jovian moons
That’s Mars at top, and Jupiter with (from bottom) Ganymede, Europa, Io, and Callisto attending. This is the best that I’m going to get with a 600mm lens, but at least it shows the proximity quite well.

I keep saying this and it keeps not happening (like how I said that as if it’s out of my control?) but I really need to get the telescope and tracking motor happening. About an hour from now, Io will be throwing its shadow across Jupiter’s face, right along the Great Red Spot, which would be a cool pic. But to get Jupiter big enough in the frame to see those details, it would be moving quite noticeably, and I’d have to counteract with the tracking motor to snag the exposure. One of these days…

Historical residents

Al Denelsbeck

I got these photos some time back – not quite a month ago, looking at the date stamps – and then set them aside when I was doing the image sorting some time after that, and am finally getting around to doing a post about them, now that I’ve seen no sign of either for a while, though admittedly I haven’t been looking closely. These were residents of one of the butterfly bushes (Buddleja davidii,) and might still be if I looked a lot closer, because they’re both great at remaining hidden.

crab spider Mecaphesa perched within blossoms of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
First up we have a variety of crab spider, and from BugGuide’s indicators, one of the 18 species of Genus Mecaphesa that we have in this country, which is as close as I’m getting. To the species name, anyway – I can get closer to crab spiders, and even handle them, anytime I want – I just don’t choose to. Despite the apparently aggressive stance, this is a typical pose for them, ready to immediately snag anything (of the appropriate size) that comes within reach to partake of the flowers. When actual danger threatens, they usually tuck in closer and slide around to the underside, or deeper within the crevices among the blossoms.

If you know your butterfly bushes, you know that the blossoms are somewhere around 8-10mm across, to give you the scale. This will come in handy later on.

crab spider Mecaphesa spread atop blossoms of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
Not long after a rain, my specimen was found perched high on the bloom spike, beseeching the heavens to stop – or to produce more rain, I’m not sure which. These are one of the species that sometimes makes itself apparent when we’ve been having hot, dry periods and I go around some of the choice plants with a misting sprayer – they’re not as exuberant about it as mantids, but they definitely come out to get some water.

crab spider Mecaphesa perched within blossoms of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
This was the image that I used to semi-confirm the Genus; you can see that the outer front eyes (anterior lateral) are a little larger than the middle (median) two, plus the spider is hairy, which most crab spiders are not. The other four eyes are out of sight from this angle, crowning in a crescent over top of the head and visible from above. The smoothly tapering nature of the pedipalps (those two little front ‘legs’ near the face) peg this as a female, since males will have club-shaped palps. I never saw this one with any prey while I was passing, but it would be easy enough to have something smaller and I’d never notice it unless I was right on top of them.

And now the other resident, sitting only a few bloom spikes away.

jagged ambush bug Phymata hiding among butterfly bush Buddleja davidii blossoms
It’s a shame these guys are so small and hard to light, since their detail is amazing. This is a variety of jagged ambush bug (Genus Phymata,) and they also adore the butterfly bushes, but are often twice as hard to spot. Their exoskeleton always puts me in mind of the classic Samurai illustrations, and while they tend to avoid me when I lean in close, they’re pretty confident when going after prey – that’s probably where the name comes from.

head-on shot of jagged ambush bug Phymata behind blossom of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
This is a slightly better view, but also check the blossom that it’s hiding behind – the overall length of the arthropod doesn’t exceed 10mm, and this one was slowly sidling out of view every time I tried for a better angle. The macro softbox rig is on a flex-arm and quite adjustable for light angle, but this doesn’t mean that other branches of the same bush won’t be preventing me from achieving the angle that works best, and even bumping them can cause a subject to panic and go for cover. I have a lot of shots (well, I mean, I throw them out) where another branch threw a shadow across my subject.

jagged ambush bug Phymata sheltering under blossom of butterfly bush Buddleja davidii while showing adhering raindrops
Perhaps the best lighting angle, because it shows the knobbiness of the chitin as well as some adhering raindrops, though the detail of the legs, pincers, and proboscis aren’t adequate. If you look closely, there’s a ‘smiley face’ on the foreleg that marks the serrated edges of their viselike pincers – you get a much better view here.

The flowers of butterfly bushes don’t last very long – about a week or so – and while they come into bloom at different times, it’s only about two weeks before the entire spike is dead and brown and not attracting any food for these guys. I watched the ambush bug here work its way up to hiding out among the only two faintly-living blossoms at the tip of a brown cluseter, not in a hurry to abandon the spike, and missed my opportunity for a shot then. The next day it was gone, and I have to paint this picture, since on this bush, the branches are all long and decently separated, so the ambush bug had quite a trek down the stem to another branch and back up to the end where the blossoms are – I looked, but could not find it either on a new spike or making progress to one. The crab spiders have it much easier: they can simply cast a webline in a faint breeze and take a shortcut across between blossom clusters, with the added benefit that they can see which spikes look the most promising. For the ambush bugs, they’re making the choice way down at the base of a fork, likely unable to see which branch is going to produce new blooms soon. Maybe they have some method of telling otherwise? You got me. As adults, they will have wings, but it’s also likely that at that time they’re not pursuing prey anymore, interested only in reproduction like many arthropods, and so the advantage of wings wouldn’t be for choosing a nice ambush spot.

But for these reasons, when I’m deadheading the butterfly bushes, I always drop the cut off dead blossoms into the pot at the base of the same plant, so if I do inadvertently cut a blossom where a spider or ambush bug (or anything else, really) is hiding, they’re still within reach of their chosen feeding locations.

I was a teenage sun

Al Denelsbeck

I had a small change I wanted to make to the solar filter holder that I’d created, and it required 3D printing a new part – so of course, the printer started printing very undependably and in a weird manner, and it took me no small amount of time to find it and fix it. Once I’d done so and finally got the new part printed and ready, the sun viewing conditions went to crap.

So finally, this afternoon, there were some breaks in the clouds and I made the attempt.

sun breaking through clouds seen through solar filter, with some sunspots beginning to be visible
It should be said that, naturally, just about the entire sky was devoid of clouds except for right where the sun was – and those were quite slow-moving. But it was better than this morning’s overcast, and complete openings did slide past from time to time. I finally got some unobscured images of the sun’s face.

sun through solar filter showing numerous sunspots of varying sizes
That’s… a lot of sunspots; Over a dozen active regions, when seen in high resolution. Sunspots are indications of heightened coronal activity, which produces solar arcs and prominences (which I’m not going to capture without some very specialized and expensive filters,) as well as the charged particles that produce the Aurora Borealis and Australis. This explains why I’ve been getting aurora alerts on my phone for the past several days, even when they didn’t look likely to reach down to these latitudes. Tonight, however, might be different. Plus we’re still in the Pleiades active period.

I feel obligated to tell you that I named the above image, “Clearasol.” You can’t compete and you know it.

Scattered, with total disregard

Al Denelsbeck

I think these are the last of the random images, though I still have a collection of thematic pics from before the trip, but I’ve been involved in other things right now and have been neglecting my sworn duties to provide content that no one reads, so we’re gonna have this and be thankful. Right?

solar halo from cirrus ice crystals
When down at the lake one day, not even sure which right now, I glanced up and realized that the conditions had provided for a distinct solar halo. These are semi-common, just often going unnoticed because what kind of idiot stares into the sun? They’re formed from high-altitude ice crystals, typically in cirrus clouds as seen here, somewhere between five and ten kilometers (16,000-32,000 feet – rough conversion for convenience, don’t waste your time.) They’re often called 22° halos because that’s how wide they span, refracting through the ice much like rainbows do, with one principle difference: rainbows appear opposite the sun, since the light reflects from the curved back surface of the water drops after passing through, and gets refracted on the way back out, while sun halos surround the sun (from our perspective, anyway) because of ice crystals that allow the light to pass through them while still refracting it into a prism. This becomes a little more obvious with some tweaking.

sun halo with heightened contrast to display refracted colors better
Boosting contrast hugely brings out the colors that I could see faintly but washed out in the initial exposure settings. It also brought out some prismatic colors from the spikes around the sun itself, but I feel confident saying this was a lens effect rather than atmospheric, possibly even meaning I was due for a lens cleaning.

This is a simple example, and the more common types are sundogs, which can be spotted often. But such halo effects can be pretty elaborate in the right conditions.

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