I left Ajo last week and drove to Granite Gap, just across the border in New Mexico. I planned to stay here awhile and do some astro and that has been working out OK. Otherwise, I think it is drier here than the Ajo area. There is not much vegetation that is green. There is a herd of cattle on this BLM land and I’ve been watching them eat prickly pear cactus. There is no grass for them to eat.
Last month, I posted about the first quasar that I had ever knowingly photographed. My story was that while waiting for the galaxy NCG 4151 to rise high enough to capture two quasars, I spent a couple of hours photographing M97, the Owl Nebula. Well, today I was reading some posts on Cloudy Nights forums and found that there is an easy quasar by M97. I went back to my photos and sure enough, there it was. I have probably photographed lots of quasars and didn’t even know it. Now I have three different identified quasars.
I had to go try again. There is something addicting about this, to keep taking photo after photo hoping for that one great photo to appear. It doesn’t happen very often. I can’t say that any of the images I got last night are great, but there were some keepers. As always, one can right click on an image and open in a new tab or window for a larger view.
A couple of nights ago I went back to Valentine Well to try for, once again, a good shot of a Townsend’s Big-eared Bat. I got no photos of that species. Bat activity at the well was pretty slow. All I got was more Yuma Myotis photos. I stayed until about 9 PM then headed back to Ajo on the Scenic Loop Road and Alley Road. As always, I was looking for snakes or whatever else might show and was pleasantly surprised with a Rosy Boa, only the second one I’ve ever seen.
Paul and Linda, fellow snowbirds and friends of mine in Ajo, own a home that has a remarkable variety of desert plants in the yard. There are several species of agave and some of these are blooming now. Nectar bats have appeared in good numbers, I’ve spent a couple of nights there photographing them. The laser trigger won’t work in this setup, so I just prefocus on a point and hope a bat comes to it.
The weather continues to be nice. Birding hasn’t been too exciting except for a pair of Forster’s Terns that appeared on the ponds one day. These are the first terns of any species I’ve ever seen on the Ajo sewage ponds. Astrophotography has been hit and miss with clouds and wind.
It is that time of year again, where there is so much to do I can’t decide what to do next. One result is I don’t get much sleep. I finally caught up on sleep last night.
I mentioned in my other post about quasars that there was another project I wanted to work on. This is it. This is one of those images I did just to see if I could do it. The Twin Quasar was discovered in 1979 and is the first gravitationally lensed object identified, thus proving Albert Einstein’s prediction from his General Theory of Relativity. Einstein thought that humans would never be able to actually observe this effect, but it has now been observed numerous times.
Friday afternoon I drove back out to Valentine Well. The weather wasn’t as warm as I had hoped but I still thought I could get some decent bat activity. About a mile before the well, I saw a sight that one does not often see here in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, an Osprey.
Bird migration is picking up nicely. I’m seeing first of spring Bell’s Vireo, Warbling Vireo, Lucy’s Warbler, Wilson’s Warbler, Bullock’s Oriole, and many more. I went out to Valentine Well a couple of nights ago to try some bat photography. That didn’t work out but I did see a Poorwill. Nights are warming up, no longer do I need four blankets! The lack of rain results in very few wildflowers, unfortunately. It is very dry.
