Mostly Birds (but not always): moon

Showing posts with label moon. Show all posts

Monday, January 21, 2019

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Lack of Depth

Could have used some more depth of field to get both the hawk and moon in focus. If I would have focused at 601 feet and stopped down to f/64 I could have had a depth of focus from 300' to infinity.

More photos taken from the deck today.

Male Scarlet Tanager singing and posing for....

.....a more dignified Scarlet Tanager.

Red-breasted Nuthatch trying to hide

Red-tailed Hawk gaining altitude

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Now Where Were We.

It has been a couple weeks since the last update. Here are a few photos coinciding with winter's end.

Purple Finch at my house

Red Breasted Merganser at Pt Mouillee

Horned Grebe at Ludington Harbor

Marlboro Man looking for a light

Ludington Light

New Yardbirds (#116)....Cedar Waxwings

Sure sign of spring....Tundra Swans

Venus and Mercury with Little Sable Lighthouse

From before the days of Aristotle it was thought that certain animals spontaneously generated under the right conditions. It wasn't until the mid-19th century, through the work of Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall, that fruitflies, mice and raccoons stopped materializing from decaying fruit, grain and sunflower seeds respectively. I imagine the recipe went something like this.......

Step 1- Place sunflower seeds in large container with unsecured lid

Step 2 -Leave overnight in cool dark area.

Step 3 -Enjoy

Note : For Black Bear replace seeds with Broasted Chicken then place in a restaurant dumpster instead of garbage can

A party can still spontaneously arise when a dog wears a hat. Whether he gets invited to the party is another matter.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Total Eclipse 8/21/2017

Disclaimer : These photos do no justice to the spectacle created by the Moon blotting out the late morning Sun.

It started innocently enough as a small notch formed on the upper right edge of the Sun.

The bite got bigger....

....until our local star showed a fat crescent.

It progress until only a sliver remained

After the last ray of sun shined through a deep crater on the Moon's rim creating a diamond ring effect(not pictured), the elusive solar corona appeared. A close look at the photo below reveals a red promenience at the same position that the moon's transit started.

A longer exposure shows the star Regulus (circled) to the lower left of the eclipsed Sun.

He had to stay home because he couldn't pass the eclipse safety test.

Sunday, May 7, 2017

Loggerhead Shrike

Just north of Manistee a Loggerhead Shrike has been hanging out on Bar Lake Rd. for a few days. On Friday I made the forty minute drive but could not find the bird. After not seeing any reports of it on Saturday, it was sighted again in the same area by Leonard Graf at 10:45 this morning. So early this afternoon I finally caught up with the little impaler as it hunted from the power lines right alongside the road.

The Red-headed Woodpecker in my yard has not been seen since the 4th which was its fourth straight day of hitting my suet feeders.

The local Pileated Woodpecker showed up in the yard after almost a one month absence.

What's remarkable in the unremarkable photo below is that the dark speck near the center is Bald Eagle flying at very high altitude.

Bald Eagle spotted without optical aid and photographed with a 500mm lens and 1.4x converter

How high you ask? Well let's do the math. First we have to figure what its angular size is. The easiest way to do this is to compare it to an object of a known angular size. After the sunset on Thursday the waning crescent Moon was high in the evening sky. So I took a photo of it using the same set up that the eagle photo was taken.

Moon shot with 500mm lens and 1.4x converter

Cut and pasted Eagle onto Moon while maintaining scale of respective photographs.

The Moon at that time was 30.807 arcminutes in angular size. By measuring the Eagles's image and comparing it to the Moon we get an angular size of 2.800 minutes of arc for the bird. Now we take 1 over the sine of 2.8 arc minutes and find that the raptor was 1227.9 times farther away than its wingspan. The wingspan of a Bald Eagle ranges from 5.9 to 7.5 feet. You could argue that the Eagle in the photo doesn't have its wings fully extended. So if you conservatively subtract a foot from the birds full wingspan you get that the birds height is (4.9' to 6.5') x 1227.9 = 6016' to 7981'

Friday, February 24, 2017

Finches on Ice

From what I hear the forecast afternoon high for my old neighborhood today is expected to be in the upper 60's. Not so here. This morning I woke at 5 AM to flashes of lightning that accompanied a light rain. I got up to the let the cat in and noticed the temperature was only 31 F which caused the rain to coat the trees with a glaze of ice.. After daybreak I was able to photograph goldfinches as they perched on my iced up oak tree.

On Sunday I thought I heard Pine Siskins in the yard but was unable to locate them. Tuesday they came down out of the trees and hit the feeders. Today they posed for photos.