I got up at 4 AM, had my coffee and a sandwich and started the long, slow drive to Pinery Canyon, on the west side of the Chiricahua Mountains. A Crescent-chested Warbler had been seen and photographed yesterday, so I thought I better go look for it. I’ve seen this species before, also in the Chiricahua Mountains so I wasn’t too disappointed not to find it today. I had a great morning! Here’s my eBird checklist. I added seven species to my year list, now at 232 species.
My best bird of the day, a Mexican Spotted Owl. It has been many years since I’ve seen one. It won’t show up on my eBird list because it is considered a sensitive species. A pretty bad photo of a Hermit Warbler, but I was glad to see it!I finally caught up to some Red-faced Warblers too. Photography was not very good for most birds, this is the best I could get. Buff-breasted Flycatcher. Another species I haven’t seen for a long time. Here’s the astro project I’ve been working on. Abell 35 was thought to be an ancient planetary nebula, located about 500 light years away in the constellation Hydra. It was eventually determined that Abell 35 was formed from a binary pair of stars and that the wind from those stars formed the bow-shock feature that can be seen in this image. Abell 35 is moving through space at 10 times the speed of sound giving rise to a shock wave that created the nebula.
There were several things working against me, it is very faint, it stays low on the horizon, and it is small. The C8 would have worked better for size, but at f6.3 and with no duoband filter for that scope, it would haven take many more hours of exposure and even then I don’t think it would be very good. As it was, with the 500 f4 and the IDAS Nebula Booster filter, I have more then 6 hours on this. I think it turned out quite well. The night of May 9, I noticed a glow in a place where there should be no glow. In between Arcturus and Spica, I could see it with the unaided eye. I set up a tripod and camera (I wish I had taken the time to set up the tracker too but didn’t) and got this. I posted it on Spaceweather.com and it wasn’t long before other folks were posting it too. It turns out it was probably a satellite fuel dump, illuminated by the sun. If so, this was at very high altitude. Others who saw it reported from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, Missouri, and New York state. The sighting from Chile is pretty incredible, it must have been at a very high altitude.
I’m still here, the weather is great and I’m having a good time. I’ve made a few trips to Cave Creek and one trip up to Rustler Park. At Rustler Park, nearly 10,000 ft. elevation, there is still snow in the gullies. I’ve been picking up birds that I haven’t seen for years, only because I haven’t looked for them. I’m at 220 species now, compared to 151 at this time last year.
Grace’s Warbler. These are fairly common in the pines but difficult to get a photo of. I found a nice flock of Mexican Chickadees. In the same area, I got two Olive Warblers, but the photos are not worth showing. On the road down from Rustler Park, I got two Montezuma Quail. Here’s one of them. I have now seen three Gila Monsters in the Granite Gap area. Here’s the third one, just this morning. I put out the black light one night while doing astro. I got some interesting insects. This one is Lineostriastiria hachita, an owlet moth that is rarely reported and almost nothing is known about it. Records are from southeast Arizona, southern New Mexico, west Texas and down into Mexico.Theodore Carpenterworm Moth, Givira theodori. Larvae of this interesting looking moth are wood borers. It has a distribution similar to Lineostriastiria hachita. Catclaw Mimosa, very common around Granite Gap and now in flower. This shrub has recurved spines that catch on clothing when walking through it. Fendler’s Hedgehog Cactus, Echinocereus fendleri ssp. fendleri. There are quite a few in flower now. Caldwell 45, also catalogued as NGC5248. Sixty million light years out there, in the direction of the constellation Bootes.NGC 4414, 62 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. It is a flocculent spiral galaxy, without the well-defined spiral arms of a grand design spiral galaxy. I should have spent more time on this one but this is what I have. There are lots of small background galaxies in this image.
I am still in Ajo. As long as it doesn’t get too hot, I’m not inclined to leave. I had a few good nights for astro but now the moon is getting bright again. Although the new dual band filter allows me to image nebulas in moonlight, it does not work for galaxies. Light pollution and moonlight are galaxies killers! Dark skies are needed. Birding has remained slow. I do have a few photos to show though.
This is a new one for me, a hybrid Blue-winged Teal X Cinnamon Teal. One can see a partial facial crescent, the white flank mark and spotting of a Blue-winged Teal on the hybrid. The top of the head is greenish on both birds shown here. I never noticed that on a male Cinnamon Teal before but it is there. Not the best of photos, the Ajo sewage ponds are a terrible place for photography. The birds are too far away and shooting is through a chain link fence, not a good combination. I haven’t seen an Elf Owl for several years now, only because I haven’t looked. Last night I decided to go owling and found this Elf Owl. These owls are migratory, I’ve seen them as early as late March, they will get easier to find as the weather warms.A crane fly on a fiddleneck plant. Nothing too special about either one, I just like the photo.M94, sometimes called the Croc’s Eye Galaxy. I tried this years ago before I was guiding, the results were not very good. I also remember seeing that faint nebulosity surrounding the inner galaxy and thinking it must be some kind of processing artifact that I needed to get rid of. It is not, that is real. Rather than repeat everything known about this galaxy, you can read all about it HERE. This is M109, a galaxy not far from M94, in Ursa Major. The most distant identifiable object in the image is the luminous galaxy SDSS J115722.65+531644.3, annotated in white. Its redshift indicates a distance of nearly 3.5 billion light years.Known as the Umbrella Galaxy, NGC 4651 is in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. The name is due to the umbrella-shaped structure that extends from its disk. It is composed of stellar streams, the remnants of a much smaller galaxy that has been torn apart by NGC 4651’s tidal forces. I really had to push the processing to make that show up!
It has been a very cool spring. I actually had frost on the truck this morning! Normally by now we would be seeing highs in the low 90’s. It looks like that will be coming next week. The Ajo area got another inch of rain too. Birding is starting to pick up, just in the last few days, Franklin’s Gulls, Vaux’s Swift, Swainson’s Hawk, and lots of White-faced Ibis have been showing up. I have a lot of new photos to post.
This is NGC 4216, the Silver Streak Galaxy. I have imaged this before (in 2021, see inset), but I wanted to do it again because of a type Ia supernova that recently occurred. It was actually reported back in January but it is still bright enough to show up. All of the nuclear firepower on Earth would seem like a firecracker compared to this Ia supernova, the explosion of a white dwarf. The supernova is marked with two red lines. This is NGC 4450, a galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, about 50 million light years out there. It is small from our vantage point in the universe, but it is about 70,000 light years in diameter. Here is Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (2024), again. It is getting low in the west but still high enough to photograph. It is easy to see with binoculars. I used a 200mm lens this time, hoping to get more of the long tail. It didn’t turn out as well as I hoped, probably due to being only about 10 degrees above the horizon and some stiff wind I had to deal with. There was another rocket launch from Vandenberg SFB last week. For this one I used longer focal length (135mm). It worked out very well with the sunset. Right click and open in a new window for a larger view. Mercury is seen just above the exhaust in the center, and the booster can be seen falling away from the rocket in the upper left.In this image the booster is seen in the exhaust plume. Nearer to the rocket are two bright objects that are the jettisoned halves of the protective payload shroud (nose cone), according my message from Launch Alert. It is amazing what can be seen from 500-600 miles away. There is another launch scheduled for tonight. This morning Vikki and I were birding around Highway Tank when we found this Coachwhip. It climbed up into a bush and I got this photo. First one of the spring for both of us! Last week, while watching some gulls at Lake Ajo, I noticed they suddenly went on alert, so I looked up and saw this Peregrine Falcon flying around the ponds. A Lucy’s Warbler at Highway Tank. Also from last week, a Lark Bunting at Highway Tank (there were two of them). First ones I’ve seen all winter and first of spring!This spring there is a lot of this in flower, Eriastrum diffusum, Spreading Woolstar. Dainty Desert Hideseed, Eucrypta micrantha. I could add many more plant photos but this will do for now!
This evening a Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to launch from Vandenberg SFB, shortly after sunset. The timing was perfect for a big show if the launch actually happened. And it did! Mike Venard came out to watch the show with me and we were both quite impressed. One really has to see it to appreciate the spectacular view, but I took photos, of course, and so here some of them are. They don’t really do justice to what we saw though.
Here’s liftoff, at about 7:30 PM. The planet Mercury can be seen in the center of the image, on the left side is the radar station on Child’s Mountain. Taken with a 35mm Sigma lens. The rocket is about 600 miles west heading south over the Pacific Ocean.The rocket rapidly speeds south leaving behind a wake of exhaust gases (mostly water that has frozen into ice crystals) that are lit up by the sun below the horizon. Perfect timing. The rocket has passed over Child’s Mountain and is heading south at probably around 5 miles per second. The booster can be seen falling away into the Pacific Ocean. By now, the whole western sky is filled with this. The booster is streaking away toward the Pacific Ocean. After the rocket was gone, these clouds remained for quite a while, basically man-made noctilucent clouds, very bright and colorful. I quickly changed lenses to a 135mm for this shot, a close up of the exhaust cloud. What a show! This is the third time I’ve seen this happen, but this was the best one I’ve seen. I posted some photos on Spaceweather.com and see this morning that one is featured in on the main web page, it can be seen at this LINK.
Last night I finally got the 500 f4 pointed to Comet 12P/Pons Brooks. This is the comet that the media has somehow come up with the name of Devil Comet, due to its odd shape earlier this year. All the hype aside, it is a bright comet right now and can be seen with binoculars low in the west after sunset. 12P/Pons Brooks is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 71 years. I thought I was going to have a hard time with it since the moon was quite bright, but it turned out to be quite easy to process.
I think if the moon hadn’t been so bright I could have got more of the tail, but I’m pretty happy with this. This is the result of 27 twenty-second exposures stacked in Deep Sky Stacker comet mode. Emory’s Rock Daisy is quite common now, rocky slopes are loaded with it. I haven’t seen much Owl Clover this spring. It is one of my favorite desert flowers, and had to photograph this one. My first Desert Spiny Lizard of the spring, out getting warmed up in the morning sun.
I made a trip to Buckeye to stock up at Walmart and on the way there, I birded. There were lots of birds at the Gillespie Dam, hundreds of egrets and herons, two species of cormorants, and lots of pelicans. Astrophotography continues to be hard, with too many clouds. But I have managed to get some done. I also made a trip down to Alamo Canyon, long overdue.
This is Abell 31, also known as Sh2-290. It is a very faint planetary nebula in the constellation Cancer. It is so faint that I cannot see it in any of my images until I stack and process. As far as planetary nebulas go, it is fairly large in view. This is what I got after 8 hours of exposure with the Nebula Booster filter and the 500f4 lens. Comet 62P/Tsuchinshan is now passing through the Virgo Galaxy Cluster, so I tried it last night. At magnitude 10.5 it isn’t very bright. The comet is over 50 million miles distance. The galaxies are on the order of 50 million light years, some are nearly 90 million light years out there. On a walk in Alamo Canyon, I found lots of Miner’s Lettuce, Claytonia perfoliata.And also Redmaids, Calandrinia ciliata.Some of the pelicans and one Snowy Egret at Gillespie Dam. Snowy Egret swallowing a fish. Abert’s Towhee at Gillespie Dam. Some of the egrets I saw. At 100mm focal length, this is all could get in one frame. Also in Alamo Canyon, I saw several Empress Leilia nectaring on Gooding’s Vervain. For me, this is unusual for two reasons. I rarely if ever have seen this species of hackberry butterfly nectar on anything and in my experience, not many butterflies nectar at this species of plant. At the parking lot in Alamo Canyon, I watched this Northern Cardinal repeatedly attack its image in a sideview mirror on another car parked there. Then it flew up onto this Saguaro to sing loudly!
It has been a while since I posted anything, so here it goes. The weather here has been just perfect, not too hot, not too cold. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of clouds cutting into my astrophotography. All the rain has started another spring bloom that could rival last years. I have to keep reminding myself that it is only early March, once the weather turns warmer, the herps, plants, insects, birds, mammals will all be more prominent. I am really looking forward to it.
This is an Acuña cactus (Echinomastus erectocentrus acunensis), an endangered cactus that only occurs in five known populations in the United States, according to my book Field Guide to Cacti and other Succulents of Arizona. I recently was shown where one of those populations is, right here in Ajo. Today I checked it out again and found one in flower. There is a dozen or more cactus in this population, though I have not made an exact count. This is Silverpuff, Uropappus lindleyi. There are a lot of these in flower now in localized areas. I liked how this photo turned out. Pelotazo (Abutilon incanum) is flowering too. A true plant of the Sonoran Desert, it requires warm winters and summer rains. It is not found in the Mojave Desert region. A late afternoon scene from last week. I was watching for a rainbow to form after some showers passed by but instead got this. The setting sun lit up the mountain known locally as Noah’s Ark in the Sikort Chuapo Mountains, east of Ajo. I had the C8 out for a few nights and did a test run on M81, Bode’s Galaxy. This came out really nice. Below M81, just above the edge of the frame, is Holmberg IX, a faint dwarf irregular galaxy and a satellite galaxy of M81. A little above on the right side of M81 is a double star that is clearly seen split. It was 100 years ago, in 1924, when Edwin Hubble proved that many of the nebulas seen in space were much further away than previously thought, millions of light years away, and that these were actually other galaxies like our own Milky Way Galaxy. M81, once known as Bode’s Nebula, is one of the billions of galaxies we now know exist.
The new moon has come and gone, and I had to deal with a lot of clouds, heavy dew, and cold. However, with the new filter I was able to take advantage of some good weather over the last few days and I had great results. Birding has remained extremely slow, nothing but the regular desert birds. I had nine photos printed for the Sonoran Desert Photo Show that is taking place in March. It is always interesting to see all the photos that are on display, I hope there is good turnout.
I tried this once before with the C8 but it is so dim that details were hard to catch when imaging at f6.3. The last couple of nights I used the 500f4 and the IDAS Nebula Booster filter and the results were amazing. This is the Medusa Nebula, or Sh-2 274 or Abell 21. It is a planetary nebula, what our sun will look like sometime in the distant future as it loses its outer layers of gas and transforms into a white dwarf. The Medusa Nebula is about 4 light years in diameter and 1500 light years distant toward the constellation Gemini. Also done with the 500f4 and the new filter, the Cone Nebula, the Christmas Tree Cluster, and the Fox Fur Nebula. The faint nebula is approximately seven light-years long (with an apparent length of 10 arcminutes) and is 2,700 light-years away from Earth. Thor’s Helmet with the new filter. I also used StarXterminator to remove the stars before processing. There are so many stars they overwhelm the image if they aren’t removed. I’ve never been able to get so much detail from the dimmer areas of this nebula. This is the Seagull Nebula, a large emission nebula between the constellations Monoceros and Canis Major. I could not fit the entire nebula in the frame with the 500f4. I may have to try a mosaic someday. You may notice the prominent bluish arc in the lower center area. This is a bow shock from runaway star FN Canis Majoris.I was at Highway Tank a couple of days ago and found this Least Sandpiper. Not exactly an exciting bird to see but it was the first one I’ve ever seen at Highway Tank. This bird puts my species total for Highway Tank at 120.This is a Desert Orangetip, the Pima variety. The Desert Orangetip ranges widely from far west Texas to southern California and into Nevada. The eastern populations are yellow on the upper wing (Pima Orangetip) and western populations are white. One of the earliest spring flying butterflies, this one is nectaring on Fairy Duster.
It is hard to believe that it is already February. It is also hard to believe how much rain the Ajo area has been getting. The ground is soggy and the mountains are green. Barring an unwelcome spell of freezing temperatures, there should be another spectacular spring bloom of flowers. Already, some are showing up. Birding has been very slow but there are signs of migration, friends in town reported seeing a Rufous Hummingbird today!
I have added more time to the Dolphin Head, I’m up to about 6 hours of exposure now. Using the new duoband filter sure makes this pop out. This is Ten-mile Wash a day after the heavy rain last week (January 22-23). Some areas around Ajo got nearly 4 inches. I’ve been coming to Ajo for almost 10 winters now and have never seen the wash with flowing water. This morning it was running again, after another inch of rain last night. Ten-mile Wash is about 1/2 mile from my camper. This morning Vikki Jackson and I hiked up McGrady Wash. We saw one butterfly, this Sara Orangetip. Fortunately, it landed a few times and let me get some photos. It has been a long time since I have had any good butterfly photos to show! Some consider this to be one species within the Sara Orangetip complex, the Southwestern Orangetip. A Canyon Wren that eventually came close enough for some photos. We also found this flowering plant, Pseudorontium cyathiferum, common name Deep Canyon Snapdragon. It is the only species in the genus Pseudorontium. It is native to the deserts of northern Mexico and adjacent California and Arizona. I’ve never seen it before, apparently it is not very common in Arizona according to records in iNaturalist. The leaves are hairy and glandular, the flowers small. Another view of Deep Canyon Snapdragon.
