Month: November 2022

Categories
Astrophotography Birding Photography

Thanksgiving Day Post

Happy Thanksgiving! I’ve been keeping busy. Birding, astrophotography, and hiking. Now I’m working on digging up 89 photos of butterflies for Gary Marrone’s 2nd Edition of The Butterflies of South Dakota. That will be a great book when it is published. Weather here has been cool but still pretty nice.

I found two Gray Vireos in the Darby Well area, first time I’ve seen Gray Vireos there for several years now.
I photographed this one capturing a leaf-footed bug.
A Hermit Thrush in Alamo Canyon.
A Verdin perching on flowering Condalia. I really like this one!
Male Northern Cardinal peeking out from the mesquite.
I’ve been adding more exposure to my Crab Nebula image, started this several years ago. I think there will be more coming.
Same with M33, Triangulum Galaxy. The giant nebula, NGC 604, is very clear in the lower left. Forty times the size of the Orion Nebula, it would outshine Venus if it were the same distance as the Orion Nebula. But it is almost 3 million light years away.
A very poor photo of a Varied Thrush, a very rare bird for this area. I found it by the school baseball field. This is only the second one I’ve seen in the Ajo area. I’ve been trying to relocate it but so far, no luck.
Categories
Astrophotography Birding Herps Insects

A Hike up Alamo Canyon

I’ve been wanting to do this since I got here, but my knee hasn’t. My left knee has been pretty sore since I left South Dakota but is slowly getting better. Today, I tested it out on Alamo Canyon, and it did fine. The park biologist, Danny Martin, told me he had seen some good butterflies there this summer, including Tropical Leafwings and Zilpa Longtails. The Zilpa Longtail would have been a lifer, but I couldn’t find any today. Probably getting too late in the season, but there were still some Tropical Leafwings, and I was very happy to get the best photos I have ever taken of that species. I saw some Tropical Leafwings years ago at Miller Canyon but had poor luck photographing them.

A Tropical Leafwing, finally posing the way I needed it to. They have a strong tendency to land, fold their wings, and face directly toward or away from me. After many failed attempts I finally got this one in a decent position, with the sun behind me. This species is very similar to the Goatweed Butterfly, but has a small tooth below that larger tooth and above the lower corner of the wing.
Then, miracle of miracles, it opened the wings up and I got just a few shots before it flew off again. The wing pattern is that of a male.
I found this Sonoran Collared Lizard basking on a rock; I don’t remember ever seeing one this late in the season.
A couple of days ago I was hiking off Pipeline Road when I found what I believe is a metate, a grinding rock used by Native Americans. It was the only large rock in the area and the flat, slightly concave surface makes it a likely metate.
The latest big excitement at Lake Ajo, a Surf Scoter.
Jupiter is now rising up over 50 degrees above the horizon, the highest altitude I’ve been image it since I started doing this. The higher altitude helps get it out of the murk and turbulence of the atmosphere. I tried it a few nights ago despite only average “seeing” conditions. I took 6 three-minute videos and stacked the best frames. Expect more Jupiter images in the near future!
Categories
Astrophotography Insects

Some Astro

The full moon is coming back strong now but I had some good nights over the last few weeks. I’ve been thinking about what I can do to improve my astrophotography and I think my best bet is a dedicated astro camera. I’ve been using an old Canon 7D MII that was modified for H-alpha. The images are always pretty noisy though and hard to process. So, maybe in the near future there will be change.

The Fiddlehead Galaxy, I started this last winter and just added several more hours.
This is called the Little Dumbbell Nebula, also designated M76. It is only about 3 arc minutes in diameter. I tried this once with the 500 f4 but it was too small to be much good. This is a planetary nebula, one of Charles Messier’s “not a comet” nebulas. It is actually quite bright, just small in view. It can be seen in Perseus; it is about 2200 light years away and a little over one light year in diameter.
NGC 654, an open star cluster in Cassiopeia. It is large enough and bright enough that it can be seen as a faint glow with binoculars. The brightest star is HIP 8106, a magnitude 7.3 star, not visible to the unaided eye.
NGC 891, an edge-on galaxy in Andromeda, about 30 million light years out there. It looks a lot like the Needle Galaxy, but it is much smaller in view. I started this one last winter too, and just added more exposure.
The Northern Trifid, located in Perseus. It is part of the huge California Molecular Cloud and very faint, a combination of dust, emission nebula and reflection nebula.
And one butterfly photo, a Ceraunus Blue nectaring on Chuckwalla Delight.