Too Early In The Season?

The cacti we planted on the east side of the house 4 years ago have been very entertaining to observe. The Cereus repandus provide spectacular flowers nearly 5" diameter, and many times I've set up cameras to monitor the night time pollinators. From those images I've also made time-lapse clips that are great fun to watch.

But I was doubly surprised to see that my neighbor's cacti, much more established than ours, were sending out buds last week, and then a day or two later noticed ours were too! Normally these guys bloom well after monsoon rains start in mid-August. These are spectacular enough they are always worth a photo session, so last night I could tell one of the buds was going to bloom, so the chance for a home photo project was presented. Also, yesterday was the day we first passed 100F for the first time this year! Hurray! Last year we had a record year where we were over 100F EVERY day in June, but I suspect that won't happen again soon - we'll see!

Anyway, my Canon XSi and 100mm macro lens were set up on a tripod and angles were examined. At left, I took a 5-frame focus stack with the sun still up to get bud to cactus stalk in focus in a single shot. That is tough to do during an automated survey of pollinators, so the only focus-stack of the night, but otherwise in all, 1050 photos were taken!

Just as predicted, the bud swelled and opened over a few hour period, starting just about sunset. At left is a sequence over about 90 minutes from the same camera setup.

For the majority of the early evening, I took images at 1 minute intervals, but about the time I headed off to bed about Midnight, I switched to 30 second intervals in an attempt to catch more of the evening pollinators. In years past, the rustic sphinx moths seem to be the "big dogs", though in the top post above, there were everything from moths to spiders to bees setting up shop in the "community".

So I happened to wake up about 5:45, the sun just peeking over the horizon. As I walked around the house, I was hoping that the exposures weren't too overexposed, but found the camera quiet - the battery had died sometime during the night. Using the flash for fill in the dark and 2 exposures every minute, I found the fresh battery installed at Midnight lasted for 5.5 hours or 660 frames - not bad! The images were plenty detailed - at left is shown one of the images at full camera resolution - you can see all the flower parts packed with pollen waiting for someone to come by.

But that someone never came.  In reviewing all the frames, no moths, no bees, no spiders, anything... It is obvious that it is too early in the season for the sphinx moths, or evidently even the bees that swarm around the flowers before sunrise. The only insect of any kind I saw in the frame was a little miniature fly shown at right. Small payback for a night's worth of exposures!  Will definitely try again later in the Summer to see if we catch bigger game...

Keeping Astronomers Hours!

As I prophesied a week ago when we returned from the Midwest, our Cereus repandus on the east side of the house has been a busy plant lately.  Past observations have revealed that a pinky-fingernail sized bud transforms to a nearly 14cm (5") diameter flower in 8 days!  Last night was the 3rd consecutive night of blossoms, but nearby storms and gusty winds made any images difficult, but I had a setup out the 2 preceding nights.  I've done the time-lapse thing before, and documented the transformation from bud to flower to pollinators, so what to do this time with the abundance of riches before me this time?

My decision was to take a detailed census of the night-time visitors that came by the flowers during the night.  Shooting a frame every 3 minutes (used on the time-lapse above), makes it likely that some will be missed, so the frame rate was moved up 6X to 30 seconds between frames.  The flowers don't open fully till about 10pm, so started about then, going to nearly sunrise at 5:30.  Yes, that is a lot of pictures (1672!), and most just show the lonely blossom, but some show more, and that is the purpose of the exercise!  At left is shown the "standard", mostly repeated 730 times the first (Thursday) night.  Of the two flower open that night, this one was about 50cm (20") off the ground - the other option was about 200cm (7 feet) off the ground!  My Canon XSi was used with the kit 17-85 lens shot at 55mm focal length, F/9 with the on-camera flash.  A third party intervalometer was used to trip the shutter every 30 seconds.

While was watching TV inside, I didn't have long to wait!  Ten minutes after starting the series, the first moth came by.  And it didn't mind the flash, hanging around for at least 90 seconds (three frames).  They are assembled together here at left.  This one didn't mind digging deep for a taste of nectar!  Click on the frame and you will note the little slit visible near the tip of the wing.  As shown at right, this same moth Note the wing slit!) returned 30 minutes later for a single frame.  While not visible in the left images, this shot shows the yellow side spots, identifying it as Manduca rustica, the rustic sphinx moth.

It was then quiet for a long time...  Some 3+ hours later elapsed until the next visitor came by at 3:15.  Another Sphinx moth, this one showing off his proboscis and head details.  Note the absence of a wing slit, so this one is a different moth.  Hard to say if the flash frightened him off or if they can feed in under 30 seconds.  Certainly the 3-frame set above, with its head buried in the flower might not have  been as distracted by the flash of light. 

Photos were taken until 5:15 am Friday morning, when the intervalometer stopped - nothing else was shown...

The following night (Friday), the flower opening was at eye level, about 180cm off the ground.  I decided to look face-on into the flower for a different perspective.  I started the sequence a little earlier, right at 10pm, and had to wait a little longer till Midnight for some action.  Thhis reveal is another rustic sphinx moth, with wings on full display, showing his large size.  I measured the flower later at 14cm (5.5"), so the wingspan is a good 12cm (5").  In order to get it all in I downsampled the image, so resolution is lost in the left frame.  The right image is shown at full resolution for maximum detail.  Antennae are folded down, and it sports what look like rabbit ears, also folded down, but might be an artifact of the coloration pattern.

A minute later another spotting, likely the
same moth was seen hovering over the flower inserting its proboscis.  It is slightly out of focus as it is too close to the camera, but if you look at the frontward of the orange-yellow abdomen spots, the upper edge is whitish as the above shot.

Fifteen minutes later, another spotting, but much more out-of-focus, so more difficult to do an identification.  for what it is worth, the proboscis, which is nearly in focus, shows a kink about at the end of its front leg.  Interestingly, in the left image, the is a kink in about the same place, so there I a chance that all three of these images are likely the same sphinx moth...

Well, that was the end of the moth appearances, but no the end of the activity.  At 5am, suddenly a spider is seen working on a web off the edge of the flower.  It has some resemblance to a huntsman spider, but I read they generally don't spin webs...  While the spider itself only appeared in one frame, the web was there the rest of the night, the flower petal it was attached to slowly bending as the above section of the web was finished and tensioned...  The web extends up 120 cm (4 feet) to the eave of the house, where it still stands.  Hmm, what might it have been trying to catch???

At 5:15 (interestingly the time I stopped taking frames the night before), it is like an alarm went off and the blossom was attacked by honeybees!  It was rare for a frame to catch less than 3 or 4 bees in the picture, often many more!  This effect is visible in the time lapse referenced in the first paragraphs time-lapse link.  From 5:15 to sunrise the bees fed hungrily.  It is interesting to note their full pollen baskets on their rear legs, even those who first appear at 5:15.  One of the frames, shown at right, looks to show a couple of intoxicated bees taking a break as they lie on their backs taking a rest before resuming work...  I never spotted any of the bees struggling with the spider web, but the location of the web might have been chosen for that purpose!

And as the twilight grew and the sun came up, the bees halted their visit too and the flower closed up and the night was over.  Very few other pollinators were spotted - I saw what looked to be an iridescent green bee of some sort, very tiny and out of focus, but mostly bees and sphinx moths, but it was fun to do the census and see what all came by during the night.  There appear to be an abundance of these night time bloomers around, and while the absolute number of these moths are small, hopefully the food source will increase as more plant these cereus.

A Promise Of Things To Come!

We got back to Tucson safely last night after our latest stay at "Ketelsen East".  It is always fun to see little changes while we're gone, especially during the monsoon season where a little rain can generate foot-high weeds, or winds can leave a couple inches of mesquite seed pods in the front yard from our neighbor's tree.  Turns out it didn't rain much in our absence, though we noticed one change...  Our cereus cacti on the east side of the house seems to enjoy a dual flowering season, and it is lined up to reward us in a few days with some new blooms.  This one plant (of 6) has 9 buds on it!  When they erupt in their nearly 7" wide blooms, it will be a spectacular display, likely before the weekend. We've documented these before both for the flower's beauty and also for its pollinators.  Our neighbor's cacti down the street is even more spectacular - when passing it on the way to work this morning, his more-established plant had no fewer than 25 flowers on it, all seemingly blooming last night.  Unfortunately when I saw it they were already on their way closed - should have been more observant when we drove by in the dark at 10:30 last night!

Meanwhile, On The Other Side Of The Yard...

It was just a few days ago that I posted about our potted Trichocereus spachianus, which bloomed in the midst of about the driest Spring on record...  Then last night, the queen of the back yard, our Cereus repandus threw out 3 blooms in one night!  Spectacular stuff!  It is amazing to note the differences in the species when it comes to the flowers.  The former potted cacti had buds showing for weeks before finally showing signs of blooming.  The Cereus repandus just showed a bud a mere 8 days before blooming last night!  On 9 June, it was a mere bud just over 1cm long, shown at left.  By last night it had transformed in the about-to-explode bud shown at right.  The viewing angle is similar in both views, both taken with the Canon 100mm macro, but of course, backed up significantly to get the entire bud in at right...  The potted Tricocereus bloom also opened a round sunset, while the "Peruvian apple" blossoms only fully open well after darkness.

I started out shooting a frame every 2 minutes, intending to do a time-lapse of the blooming, though it would be difficult to do better than the one done a couple years ago...  The flowers are huge - something close to 7" diameter!  The shot at left was taken when finally wide open something close to Midnight...  Of course, I had to do a focus-stacked shot, assembled from 14 frames taken at slightly shifted focal positions for increased depth of field.  Shown at right, the close-up shows nearly everything in focus.

Another big difference from a couple nights ago were the surprises found when doing the regularly-exposed shots all night - pollinators showing up to do their job!  I had 2 cameras exposing until the shutter blew up on one of them, and caught some very nice shots of Rustic Sphinx Moths.  While I had caught a couple back when doing the time-lapse before (a couple months later in mid-August), the pictures taken last night show their incredible probiscii - as long or longer than their considerable wingspan! The shot at left shows the best overall shot of the moth, likely resting while feeding on nectar.  At right shows one likely coming in for a landing or hovering with the incredible proboscis.

Similarly, if you can tolerate one more, another is coming in from a different angle, but shows a similar long proboscis...  It is always incredible to watch the short-term changes as these flowers open and close up again by sunrise.  Don't know if I'll assemble the time-lapse, but if we get more buds later in the summer, you can bet I'll be out looking for camera prey like these moths again too!

A Beacon In The Desert Night!

A year ago we blogged about a suspected cereus cactus that bloomed out of a pot in the back yard.  I still don't know what it is, but suspected it is a cereus from the night-blooming flowers that closely resemble others in that family.  It was just a couple nights ago I last blogged about how miserably dry it was this year and we needed to water anything we wanted to stay alive.  Well, every week or so when I think about it I throw a little water in the pot and even as I wrote that post the other night, the bud this plant was showing a little activity, shown at left.  It is usually tough to predict exactly when they are going to bloom, but it was definitely close!  Turns out 24 hours later was the answer!

That next night I was running around with the cat feedings and immediately noticed the change.  The huge bud was much changed from the above image.  Not only was the front part much swollen, but the stigma part of the inner flower was protruding from the tip of the bloom, shown at right.  So far, all these images are single-shots, taken with the 100mm Canon macro lens.  But given the rapidly fading night, the need to shoot wider apertures, and given all I've learned about focus stacking to deepen the depth of field, it was time to get to work!  I decided against trying to do a time-lapse video...  I did that a couple years back with another variety of cereus, and while spectacular, I wanted to work more with focus stacking and higher magnifications...

I've talked about focus stacking before, and the results are quite incredible!  In short, multiple images are taken with slight changes in focus between them.  There is an easy-to-follow video tutorial link in my previous post that shows how to combine the sharp parts of each image in Photoshop that leads to incredible depth of field, if you want that sort of thing.  Of course, sometimes you only want to keep the object of your interest in focus, but in macro shooting, generally you only have a very narrow depth of focus, so for subjects like a large flower in dim light, it is a natural!  In the image at left, 8 frames with slight focus changes between are combined to keep nearly everything in focus while shooting straight down the flower...  Taken moments after the shot above, it is a different perspective you wouldn't be able to get in a single shot (and have it all in focus).

The bloom opens relatively quickly as the sun approaches the horizon.  Less than 60 minutes later, the flower bloom finally opens to start to reveal the interior.  At left is a 14-frame focus stack to keep all details in focus.  As you can see, the depth of field is incredible!  The stigma and sepals are a couple inches apart and otherwise couldn't be in focus at the same time.  At right is a close-up of the same image, at nearly full camera resolution.  While the detail is spectacular, note that there are some artifacts - particularly around the petal inner aperture.  In the shots focused on the deep interior, the out-of-focus petals obscured part of the details and can be seen as a diffuse zone against the interior structure.  But these artifacts are hardly objectionable - bet you didn't spot them before I pointed them out!

And as a demonstration as to what the original frames looked like, at left here is a single frame of the 14 used to put together the above focus stack.  You can certainly see when comparing it to the final focus stack above it how much you gain from combining the multiple frames...  I took another focus stack of the oblique view just afterwards, another 13-frame stack at right that keeps the entire bloom in focus - F/7.1 was my standard F/stop here to compromise light-gathering in the twilight and minimize diffraction at smaller apertures.



Shortly after the above, it got dark, and for subsequent shots, I was focusing and composing by flashlight - not as much fun as you imagine!  Fortunately it was the day before full moon, so I didn't need too much extra light.  At left, just to prove it could be done, is a focus stack of 3 frames, each 20 seconds exposure by moonlight!  At right is sort of a maximum close-up I can do with the macro plus extension tubes showing some of the microscopic details of the stigma.  It was a single exposure with the on-camera flash.  It would, of course, benefited from focus stacking, but in total darkness, it was tough to get any sort of focus at all, let alone try to get systematic changes in focus for a series.  Some other time!

Before bedtime I checked out the flower again - appearing pretty much at full-open.  While a 2-frame focus stack (at F/9 to get both flower and cactus spines in focus), failing light wasn't a reason to keep the aperture open with use of the on-camera flash.  The last shot on the right taken the next morning shows not a lot of overnight changes.  The flower looked pretty good, like it hadn't been visited by very many night-time pollinators.  I've never seen this cactus set fruit, perhaps the pollinators aren't out this time of year, or perhaps there aren't enough of this species around to cross-pollinate.  But it is always a fun subject to practice new techniques, even for the night-bloomers!

EDIT: It has a name!  Coworker Phil Muir suggested this cactus might be a trichocereus.  I normally think of my neighbor Jack's beauty when that name is mentioned.  Doing a Google image search, I found an exact replica of our potted cacti, Trichocereus spachianus, or Echinopsis spachiana

Saving The Natives!

Time to rant about the weather again!  While the astronomer in me likes to see blue sky every day, like the song says "If you want the things you love, you must have showers" (Pennies From Heaven, 1936).  Tucson, while you expect to be dry since it is smack dab in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, is still woefully short of its normal dose of rainfall.  Through May we normally have just over 3" of rain for the year, but so far we've had a single rainstorm, split between the first and second of March for a total of .6"!  Before that, you have to go back to the week before Christmas when we had .2"... So it has been dry - a dry heat, like they say, since our highs our spiking well over 100F lately, though we've not broken 110 yet.  I'm still amazed at the extremes here - growing up in the Midwest, the outer surface of an icy drink was always wet from condensation.  The other night at the 10pm weather, the temp was still 88F, and the dewpoint (the temperature you would get condensation) was -2F for a relative humidity of 3%!  That is just astounding to me...

Anyway, if you have trees or plants of any kind, even the native plants that would normally live in the area, they need monitoring and regular watering. Case in point are a couple prickly pears I planted about 5 years ago in the front yard.  I'd not been paying much attention the last couple weeks and they were looking pretty ratty, even though it sported a bloom a week or so ago.  The picture at left shows the before image from 3 days ago - just shrunken incredibly.  At left it is shown today after a couple sessions with the hose dripping on it.  The pictures were taken within a few minutes of each other to compare Saturday's view to today (Tuesday) for matching lighting.  It plumped right up and looks a lot happier!

Here is a close-up of one of the pads taken before and after.  I'm glad it recovered.  Though it is not doing well this year with the lack of rain, this plant was started from a single pad about 5 years ago.  The plant I cut it from was quite incredible - each pad of the plant was like a plate of flowers, with buds and blooms covering the edge and popping out of the center of the pads too.  I think it needs a lot more rain for that much activity.  When it is this dry they nearly go into suspended animation without much new growth to save energy.  Once the Summer rains start in a month or so, it is amazing how fast they will respond!  I can't imagine trying to keep a green lawn in conditions like these!

It's That Time of Year!

A couple notable milestones today - first of all, it broke 100F in Tucson today!  Turns out, 16 May is about average for it to happen.  Last year, it didn't happen till 1 June, but then set a record by exceeding 100F for every day of the month, the first time it has ever happened!  It has also broken 100F as early as April too, so really, it is the season for that to happen.  One of the local stations runs a contest to name the date, hour and minute that it happens, the big prize being a trip to Cancun or somewhere, so is kind of a big deal 'round here.  They call it the "Icebreak Contest", when the proverbial ice breaks on the Santa Cruz River...  Of course, the Santa Cruz is a dry wash for 360 days of the year, so you have to use your imagination!

The other milestone is that our neighbor's saguaro cactus started blooming yesterday!  A couple years back it was damaged by some cold temperatures (they don't do well below 28F for more than a few hours).  It lost a good 60" (1.5 meters) off the main trunk, and one of the arms, normally held high, droops down to almost head level.  The good thing about that, if it survives, is that the flowers normally out of reach will be easily accessible.  The amazing thing about this particular branch is that it had literally dozens of buds on it.  Unfortunately they don't bloom all at once, only a couple per night typically, but it may keep me entertained for weeks!  The shots shown at left and right were taken a couple days ago, and you can see my reason for excitement.

What you may not know about the Sonoran Desert icon, Cereus giganteus or Carnegiea gigantean is that they are night bloomers, opening shortly after sunset and close up in the heat of the next day.  They require pollination from other plants, but fortunately there are numerous night-time and early-morning pollinators from long-nose bats, birds and insects.  One of my favorite local bloggers, biologist M. Brummermann has a great post on non-insect pollinators...  Shown at left is tonight's crop of flowers, freshly opened! 

I checked on these about an hour after sunset and they were just starting to open.  An hour later and they were in full bloom!  The closer you look, the more the flowers look fake!  The short white petals look like the satin cloth that make up a lot of artificial flowers, and the cup-shaped bowl full of pollen almost looks artificial in it's perfection.  I'm going to look at these in the morning to see if they look a little more ragged after a night's worth of visits...  At least I'm glad I don't have to be 20 feet in the air in the dark to take these closeups!


Edit:

Of course, there are a couple things I forget when writing a post...  Concerning the 100 degree temps, of course, the local qualifier is that at least "It's a dry heat!"  It is not as uncomfortable as you might think because your body's cooling system works fine - while you sweat, you sweat efficiently - no sweaty clothes!  And that is one of the reasons we can have low temperatures near 60F, yet break 100F later in the day - dry air takes less energy to heat up than humid, so you can usually infer that when it is that hot, it is also dry.  Case in point, last night when we heard it had broken 100F on the 5pm news, the dewpoint at the time was 1F, for a depression of nearly 100 degrees (!) making the humidity 3%!

Shown here is a photo of the neighbor's saguaro flower this morning after surviving the night time pollinators.  Looks none the worse for wear, though perhaps in our part of town we don't get many pollinators.  There are some differences from the freshly-bloomed blossom above - the center of the flower is much deeper, either an artifact of the flower further blooming or of pollinators burrowing in to get to the nectar at the flower bottom, their ultimate interest in exchange for carrying pollen...

So of course, I had to stick my finger in it...  If you went to the Brummermann blog above, you saw birds that stuck their heads into the flower and came out yellow-headed!  So yes, I had to try and sure enough, the pollen coats your finger, or whatever it comes in contact with to carry to the next plant and cross-pollination goes on.  The macro lens (Canon 100mm used for all these shots) can resolve the pollen grains against my fingerprint structure...

I'm sure that by the time this saguaro is done blooming, you'll be bored with all my posts on it.  Then, of course, comes the fruit and seeds from the plant - much more interesting when the flowers/fruits/seeds are at eye level than 30 feet in the air!

A Spring Long Sprung!

It has been a warm, dry Winter!  While it didn't break 80F until the end of January, there were 22 days that month over 70F, and lots more days in the 80s in February and March.  And dry!  We've only had .6" of rain this year, that back the first 2 days of March, so it has been dry, even for the desert.  As a result, we had a pretty dreadful wildflower season, and we're coming up fast on the cactus flower season, which will bloom even if we've had no rain, though not as plentiful or long-lasting as if we'd had more substantial moisture.  And I'm always looking to show off more examples of the focus stacking technique in macro shots, so was about time to get out looking...  I've got a number of posts on focus stacking, check out some of those results too!

These first shots were actually taken a month ago in March after the little rain we got.  The plant is Desert Globemallow, a native plant to the local desert that while considered a weed in most yards, I let it grow in our pea-gravel front yard...  I give the plants a squirt of water when I think of it, otherwise just leave it along and it gives a bit of color even with it as dry as it has been.  It was also a month ago that I went chasing after it with the macro lens and tripod, and even though it was a windy day, got a couple decent shots.

While the flower looks pretty big in the shots here, they are moderately small, about 1.5cm, 3/4" in diameter.  With the meager wildflower season we had, what few flowers there were around were heavily trafficked with pollinators.  With Arizona now populated by "killer bees" that moved up from South America, you have to assume bees and colonies are of the Africanized versions and you need to be careful not to upset groups of them.  This one in particular was small, and totally zoned-out on the pollen in this flower.  I took a couple multi-shot sets (several frames-per-second while cranking focus slightly) for focus stacking.  Since the 2 shots are clearly different, he was clearly paying no attention to me.  while I didn't quite get the full range of focus for every detail, sharpness is pretty good.  I think the wind was more of an issue rather than pollinator motion!

Now in April we're approaching cactus flower
season, and my neighbor Susan's prickly pear are covered with buds about to pop.  I had a few minutes before heading in for an afternoon shift at work, so again got out the macro and tripod for some focus stacking.  Wind was substantial, but affected the prickly pear less than wildflowers, so didn't have any issues.  With focus stacking, you don't need to stop way down to increase the depth of field, in fact, doing that increases diffraction which decreases overall resolution.  Keeping it at a moderate f-stop, in this case, F/8, taking several shots at different focal positions to get everything in focus, then combining them in Photoshop gives some excellent results!  At left is shown one of the subframes, and you can see the 2nd bud from the right is in focus, but the others are less sharp.  Loading all 6 frames and following the workflow (I follow the YouTube tutorial by Tony Northrup), only the sharpest part of each frame is combined into the final image, shown at right.  I didn't go too extreme and get the background parts of the cactus in focus, but all the buds along the pad shown here are shown in sharpest focus.

While the full-frame of the camera is shown in the above examples, the focus stacking technique seems to work right down to the finest resolution.  At left here, you can look pretty closely and I don't see any artifacts or defocus, which is very close to the resolution limit of the camera from the focus-stacked shot above.

I continue to be amazed with the technique, and once learned, comes second nature - easy to both take the exposures as well as run them through the software.  I can't wait to continue to apply what I've learned to my macro imaging!