I’m currently parked in the campground at the Valley of Fires Recreation Area, near Carrizozo, New Mexico. I’ve been here four days now. This area is in the Malpais Lava Flow and is a pretty nice area, especially since there has been a lot of rain. It is a nice campground too, with showers, electric hookups if needed (I don’t need them), not crowded at all. With my senior pass it costs $6.00 a night. I hoped for some astrophotography and finally last night it was clear and calm. I had an experience with a new night sky object too, a weather balloon.
Last night while I was setting up for planetary photography, I saw a very bright object in the east. There wasn’t supposed to be anything there of that magnitude of brightness. I had the C8 on the mount so I put in a 15X eyepiece and this is what I saw. I decided to hook up a camera and took a few photos. This is most likely a weather balloon, from what I’ve read they can be up to 25 miles high in the atmosphere. The best night I’ve ever had for imaging Jupiter. It rises to over 40 degree above the horizon and last night seeing was pretty good. I’ve never got detail like this before. One can even see detail in the Great Red Spot! This is a stack of about 12,000 frames from 3 minutes of video. Saturn was lower and as always, dimmer, so it is difficult to get as many video frames. Still, it came out OK. Saturn is almost as far away from Jupiter as Jupiter is from Earth. Twice I have come on Scaled Quail with young ones, but the young ones always scurry off and hide before I can get any photos. And Checkered-Skippers, this one on some species of composite. A new flower for me, Phemeranthus aurantiacus, Orange Fameflower. There are many species of mallows in bloom, colors range from white to red. A red mallow.
2 replies on “Valley of Fire, New Mexico”
Really good pictures, it must be really pretty in bloom like that, with all the butterflies around. The planetary photos are really good too. We used to see scaled quail in west Texas, I always enjoyed that. I’ve never seen any of the young though. I hope you can get pictures of them.
I think it would be easier to photograph the chicks if they were coming to a feeder, but these are just too wild and wary. I’ll keep trying though!
2 replies on “Valley of Fire, New Mexico”
Really good pictures, it must be really pretty in bloom like that, with all the butterflies around. The planetary photos are really good too. We used to see scaled quail in west Texas, I always enjoyed that. I’ve never seen any of the young though. I hope you can get pictures of them.
I think it would be easier to photograph the chicks if they were coming to a feeder, but these are just too wild and wary. I’ll keep trying though!