Whitewater Draw Weekend

With Winter firmly ahold of us (temps in the 60s!), it was time to plan a birding trip to Whitewater draw. I've posted about our many trips there a couple times a year for nearly a decade since we discovered it. In recent years, Arizona Game and Fish have installed a webcam to keep an eye (and ear!) on the action there. This year showed a LOT more water than in the last few years. I'm not sure it is from more rainfall or if the irrigation system is working again after failing a few years back. It sort of put a crimp on the cranes the last few years, so was looking forward to seeing the place again.

I ended up going out both Saturday AND Sunday! There were lots of cranes, but interestingly, they were all avoiding the water! Years past they all gathered in the shallow water to avoid predators (coyotes) through the night, but now they gathered on the banks. But this behavior brought them closer to the walking path, so was able to get some good close-ups.

The main activity besides resting (feeding is generally done in fields away from the wetlands), as well as male posing, presumably looking for females, or exerting dominance. The pair of males shown here were trying to out-do each other. I was in the perfect spot for the photo at left where they were standing tall with wings outstretched - mirroring each other. The left image is a full-resolution blowup to show the steely gaze of the crane looking my way.


It so happened that I was set up next to 2 other photographers - all of us shooting with the same setup - Canon cameras with the 500mm and 1.4X extender! I was the only local one. Anyway, the two cranes continued their antics shown here. At right, one went low the other high, and finally at right it appears the confrontation was over. I wasn't sure which one won the contest, but I'm sure that THEY did!

The group of cranes adjacent to the walking path was closest to us, but was small in numbers compared to the main group which seemed to the west side of the wetlands, about a quarter mile or so away. They were raising quite a racket out there, and in binoculars, seemed again to be avoiding the water. Some snow geese were, as usual, scattered among the sand hill cranes.

I love their rattling calls. If you tune in to the webcam above, you can hear them. On occasion when something causes them to take to the air, the show starts when you hear the wing beats of thousands of cranes taking to the air, then the ruckus starts with the calls also filling the air. I can sit and watch/listen for hours, which I generally do - occasionally taking a photo or two!

At left, the view is towards the west - the large groups of cranes can be seen at bottom, with many taken to the air, seen in silhouette against the Mule Mountains. The lowlands contain fields where the cranes often congregate.  At right is a view to the northwest, again seen against the mountains illuminated by a very low sun.

As has happened a few times in the past, as sunset neared, there appeared a "tornado" of blackbirds, rushing in huge groups to congregate in the reeds and rushes around open water. Upon closer examination, they were, in fact, yellow-headed blackbirds. At left they are seen as they gather, with cranes in the background. They are evidently close cousins of the more common redwing blackbirds, but Whitewater is the only place I've seen the yellow-headed version.

There were many other species of birds feeding. Here at right are seen a group of American coots taking one last feeding trip across the wetlands before it got dark. Only seen in silhouette here, they sport nearly white beaks and dark red eyes, making them more striking in full sunlight...


I had spotted a great blue heron as we entered from the parking lot, and right on cue at sunset, it flew right in front of me to roost in a clump of vegetation not 50 yards away. In the deepening twilight, the exposure was long enough that the wing flaps were blurred, but in scanning to follow it, at least the pupil of the eye is still sharp!

The usual routine was for the cranes to return to the protection of the water as nightfall came. Many took to the air and flew nearby, and it is always a challenge to capture them against the twilight sky. At right is about my best effort as they were gliding without flapping their wings. Even as it got dark they were sharply captured.


I'll have to say, that Saturday's twilight was likely the most spectacular I've ever seen! Of course, there are a lot of those in AZ, but this one was very long-lasting, actually 45 minutes of color from looking at the time stamp on my images. I've got 2 to show here, at left a single image showing some of the birders here distracted by the sunset colors. And at left is a 3-image "HDR" (High Dynamic Range) photo that combines different exposures to extend the visibility of highlights and shadows...

It was clear enough on Sunday to take a few
star photos.  The big news in astronomy now is that in the constellation of Orion, the upper left star, Betelgeuse has been growing fainter than it has ever been seen!  Instead of the brightest star in the prominent constellation, it is now third-brightest, effectively tied with Bellatrix, the upper right star.  At left I took a photo purposely out of focus to show the colors of the striking constellation.  The orange color of Betelgeuse reveals it to be a red giant star - very cool (thus orange-colored) compared to the bluish other stars of the constellation.  At right is another not quite as far out of focus to show much fainter star colors.  While most are still blue, many fainter ones have reddish colors as well.

I've only started to harvest images from these 2 trips, so look for more soon, as well as likely more trips while the cranes are here!

Cranes!

This last weekend I made my first trip to Whitewater Draw this season. Normally we would do a couple trips per season, so there are lots of posts and photos to peruse from years past. In recent years the sandhill cranes that over-winter seem to be dropping in numbers, perhaps associated with the lower levels of water there. Whether it is a natural-caused issue or if they aren't pumping as much as in the past, I'm not sure. In any case, there is still a live web-cam for viewing (and hearing) the cranes, located at a site run by AZ game and fish...


It is always a nervous time driving down the access road - what will you see? Often times arriving in the afternoon is a gamble as most of them fly out into local crop fields to feed during the day and only return around sunset. In my opinion, I love arriving mid-afternoon and waiting to watch (and hear) them upon their return!  As I parked, an eerie sight was beheld - lots of cranes, but was strangely silent! They often cluck and talk to each other, but on Sunday it was almost reverently quiet... There were lots of people - I came a week after the "Wings over Willcox" celebration on purpose, when it was likely even more crowded. Taking the last parking lot close to the viewing areas, I mounted the 500mm on the tripod and took the couple hundred yard hike.


As I walked up the trail, was able to squeeze off a few shots including a variety of birds shown at left above. Besides the grey and buff sandhill cranes, there were the almost pure white snow geese, and the Northern Pintails grazing in the shallow water. At right I caught a few of the snow geese taking off from that location - the last of the bunch we saw that afternoon!

While shooting the cranes standing on the ground is like "shooting fish in a barrel", they look a lot more graceful as they fly. They can also pass appreciable closer while flying by than standing at a safe distance. Of course, catching them flying introduces a whole new set of issues - focusing and tracking them as they move! Fortunately the big 500mm lens has pretty much instantaneous focus, and will even take out any unsteadiness as you pan to track them! As a result, I can usually get a couple frames like that at left. My criteria for sharpness is if you can resolve the pupil of their eye! Fortunately, I also like shooting the cranes passing by local landmarks like nearby mountains, in which case, no tracking needed. At right are a flock of them passing by a favorite landmark - Cochise's Head, located north of the Chiricahua mountains. Also visible are cars on the local access road and irrigation equipment in nearby fields...

Speaking of a sharp eye pupil as a standard of quality, I noticed something else this trip. In shooting some of the nearest cranes to our observation stand, one of the cranes looked bizarre - it appeared to have NO pupils at all! Now over ALL the sandhills I've shot over the years, they all appeared to have the yellow pupils that I thought were standard. Yet, as shown at left, the bird on the right appeared to have some eye disease or something! Strange, huh? A minute later I took another shot, and modified the image so both birds were magnified and moved next to each other. You might be able to detect in the image at right that, in fact, it does have pupils, but the eye color is dark brown - weird!



I must say, though, that while all sandhill cranes look regal in the above photos, that when they are looking straight at you with both eyes visible, they look a little what, dorky? I don't know what it is, but it makes them look a lot less intelligent, almost like an idiot caricature of themselves... Maybe its just me!

There were other birds near us we got to see up close. In years past there were at least 2 large shallow ponds that attracted many water fowl that mostly have disappeared now with the low (or no water in the ponds!). Goodbye to Mergansers, pie-billed grebes and even the American Coots - none seen this year! One of the few additions to the monoculture of Sandhills were Northern Pintails, as shown at right. They were near us, mostly heads underwater grazing in the shallows. In this shot the male is below and the female above - an amazing difference in coloration and pattern!


I prefer a clear sky while visiting Whitewater - illumination and shadows seem sharper. But there were some high clouds that moved in on Sunday, thicker as sunset approached. But as it will sometimes do in AZ, it suddenly thinned as the sun sank behind the mountains to the west. Suddenly there was a spectacular coloration to the west, and a phalanx of photographers gathered at the west side of our platform!

At first I took a shot of the sunset, at left. After that, it was fun to get profiles of the photographers at work shooting birds and sunset together, as shown at right.



I took a few more, but my favorite is the close-up shown at left, showing a photographer in close profile, with another telephoto intruding at right barely seen in the dark part of the sunset...

Shortly after this suddenly a din erupted as cranes seemed to converge from all directions! It was just getting dark enough that imaging them was very difficult as the coloration and lighting was dim to get their silhouette, and it was mostly their noise that assaulted the senses! I did manage to get the shot at right, with a profile of hundreds of cranes in the last light of the twilight...



Finally darkness descended, but I had one more trick up my sleeve! Just having obtained a flash while in the Midwest (unfortunately, the full-format canon 6D has no built-in flash) I used it to reach out to a flock of cranes gathered perhaps 150 yards away. With a high ISO (3200) fast aperture (F/4) and full flash power, I got the shot at left. What is most amazing is the cats-eye effect (same as red-eye in human subjects in a darkened room). The light from the flash is focused in their eye, and reflects back out like the glass micro-spheres in reflective road signs. Every crane that had an eye pointed in my direction (at least one had both eyes visible, and another duck or waterfowl) showed the effect! Always fun stuff!

I'm hoping to get back again before March arrives and cranes head north. Even though a mid-afternoon arrival requires sitting and waiting a few hours for sunset to arrive, I can think of fewer locations that are as nice to just "chillax" for a long period of time!

Eclipse!

Some of you heard we had a lunar eclipse Sunday night (20 Jan, 2019)... Of course it was hyped by the Internet to be the Super-Blood-Wolf Moon, as if just calling it a lunar eclipse wouldn't be as exciting! Well, you will get no embellishments here... Total lunar eclipses are always fun to look at, and lead once upon a time to my second published image - in the Des Moines Register no less, way back in 1975!

So I'm back in Arizona again, usually the bastion of clear blue skies, but in the week here the sun has only made rare appearances, and the forecast for eclipse evening was depressing to say the least! At least the high temperature that day was 79! It was perfectly clear at "Ketelsen East" should I have observed it from there, but the temperature at eclipse time was -5F! Blue sky and thin clouds thickened as sunset approached in Arizona, but always willing to take a chance, drove out to a dark-sky site that the Tucson astro club used to use a couple decades ago - Empire Ranch, about 40 miles SE of Tucson. I wasn't much interested in the partial phases, but sky looked to be mostly clear with only about half of the moon showing.


I set up my Polarie tracking mount - a simple tracker for camera-only use - no tracked telescopes for this eclipse. I did set up my big binoculars for a visual look occasionally. With the moon still partially lit by the sun, a 44-degree halo was apparent and I took a few shots of that before totality started. Totality finally came and while impressive visually, the slightest magnification showed the effects of thin clouds. The photo at left shows the view with a normal lens - the overexposed pink spot is the eclipsed moon, and M44, the Beehive Cluster is to its left and constellation Gemini above in a 30 second exposure. The thin clouds made the stars misty - showing the color differences more clearly. The two bright stars above the moon - Pollux, the lower, is cooler and more yellow than Castor, the upper one...


I tried a couple lens combinations, but again, the clouds made getting anything worthwhile difficult, so decided to stick with wide-angle lenses, finally choosing my relatively new-to-me Sigma 15mm fisheye lens, taking a 30 second exposure every 40 seconds... The exposure was perfect for showing the Winter Milky Way when the clouds parted enough to show it! And all the grand constellations - Orion, Gemini, rising Leo to the far left were visible, as well as the brightest star Sirius (other than the sun) to lower center, and the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in Taurus at upper right are evident. The yellow light glow are reflected from the cities of Sierra Vista to the lower left, and Nogales, AZ to lower right. I ended up with about 40 frames, extending from about 15 minutes before the end of totality to about 15 minutes afterwards, so decided to put them in a little time lapse using Moviemaker, after minimal processing of each frame. The 7 second loop was repeated 3 times, and the result was then uploaded to Youtube for you to look at here:





If you want any more than that wide-field view, please refer to the last eclipse visible from here, back in September of 2015! Like I said, you don't need to hype it any more than what it really is - a lunar eclipse! The next one fully visible across the country isn't until March of 2025 (some partly visible before then), so a good long wait for the next one to be high in the sky!

In Search of Foregrounds!

A Facebook friend of mine, Paul Schulz, posted a spectacular photo a few weeks ago - the Milky Way rising past an old windmill in the foreground. As any photographer will tell you, sometimes the foreground adds more to a composition than the subject, and in this case, makes a superb Milky Way shot even better. Shown at left, it is a single exposure with a fast, wide angle lens, exposure short enough that the stars don't show appreciable trailing as the earth rotates beneath. But to record decent detail, lens must be used wide open and at the risk of noise appearing with a very high camera ISO.

At my request he told me where he found it - in a canyon on the southeastern slopes of the Graham Mountains, about a 15 minute drive from his home in Safford, but a nearly 2 hour drive from Tucson! There might well be country windmills closer, but this one was proven to have NO light pollution in the area. My thought was to photograph the constellation Orion rising past the windmill - something everyone would recognize... So I drive out there, arriving about sunset and wouldn't you know, someone was camped beneath it! I figured it was a hunter as deer season had just started, but no, it was Kevin from Iowa, just camping for a few weeks. We had a nice long chat and I ended up taking a few photos anyway, even though he had a solar panel and electricity, lighting up the bottom half of the windmill like a Christmas tree - not suitable for dark-sky imaging!

But we had a great time, talking about our lives in Arizona and past lives in Iowa and once he figured out what I was doing, let the campfire die down and turned the lights on the windmill out as well.  I eventually took a few test shots, leaving any real effort on Orion for another time!  At left are the star clusters the Pleiades at center (Seven Sisters) and Hyades between Pleiades and tree below (Vee shaped) rising in the east.  Orion would be just below them an hour later...

I didn't wait that long - I needed to return to do some training with night staff at work, but before leaving, I noticed that the setting Summer Milky Way was making a nice "V" in the western sky with the Zodiacal Light! Shown at right, the Zodiacal Light is a cone-shaped white glow extending to the left behind the windmill, appearing in the western post-sunset sky December into February, and the eastern pre-dawn sky September into November. It is sunlight being reflected from meteoritic dust in the plane of our Solar System, mostly released from Comets and asteroidal collisions... It needs a dark sky to be really apparent, and in fact, many of my Midwestern amateur astronomer friends have never seen it! This is a single 40-second exposure with a fisheye lens - the one shot that didn't have a lot of airplane in it to edit out! That is Kevin being illuminated faintly by the embers of his campfire!

So yes, will likely return someday to so more shots similar to Paul's. It is a nice spot to camp out, in a little valley near a small stream - even now running likely from melting snow from higher elevations. Not a productive night, but they always turn out fun and interesting!

Another Post-Thanksgiving Outing

It was such a perfect Thanksgiving weekend - Temps in the low 70s and a perfect blue sky. On Saturday was the final football game of the year - archrival Arizona State was in town for the big game. If AZ wins, they qualify for a bowl game, lose and they are done till next Fall. Can't get much more dramatic!

I took the opportunity to do a little road trip to "A" Mountain, otherwise known as Sentinel Peak, located about a mile to the SW of Tucson's downtown area. It has a paved road to the peak, a few hundred feet above the desert floor and the view extends from south to north - an expansive view that is popular all day long!

I chose to set up my TEC 140 refractor and take some photos of my favorite landmarks, and with Arizona Stadium a mere 3 miles away, used it as a target to evaluate a 2X converter (doubled the focal length, thus the scale of images). At left is a photo taken with a 50mm "normal" lens with my fave targets labeled.

I've used this telescope to image AZ Stadium before. Seeing effects (atmospheric turbulence caused by mixing of different temperatures of air) usually limit the sharpness at 3 miles distance. But still, the scope is ALMOST sharp enough to recognize people from 3 miles! Shown here are the full frames of the Canon 6D of the stadium view. Clearly seen is that in the view with the 2X converter at right, the image is larger and field of view is narrower. The real question is whether use of the converter provides any advantage, or can you just enlarge the straight image in Photoshop...

Of course, the real limitation on this blog is that images are limited to 1600 pixels wide, while the camera has almost 5500 pixels across the image! So just showing you the full image above you are losing a huge amount of resolution because each pixel there shows an average of almost 16 pixels in the original image (4 across and 4 high).

So here is the answer. Shown here at left are full resolution crops from single images from each configuration. The fields of interest are the same - the 2X converter version below is on the left side without the converter so you can compare directly (taken a few minutes apart, 2X later). It looks fuzzier, but again, because the scale is doubled, is resolution any worse? I think the answer is no - the bowl games played are about equally legible, as are details in people and clothing being worn. I think both are limited by the atmospheric turbulence - the effect can be seen in the horizontal white line in each - wiggles seen in it is caused by turbulent air mixing at these large magnifications... Oh, and by the way, I went to some length to minimize vibration - used a 2-second delay after pushing the camera button, and also locked up the view mirror to minimizw "mirror slap". So it is a wash for distant objects to use the converter or not. Perhaps closer objects less limited by "seeing" might work better with the 2X converter...

I then moved to a few of my other favorite targets. At left is the old Pima County Courthouse, with its distinctive tile domed roof. It is interesting that it is seemingly surrounded by newer boring architecture...

Also photographed, but not detectable by eye mid-afternoon was the "window" of Window Rock. A good 16 miles away from my "A" Mountain observing location, it is visible by eye from Midtown when conditions are right - preferably evening or morning twilight. Here the scope makes shooting it simple!




I also did a 10-frame mosaic past AZ Stadium up through the NE side of town. Combined together in Photoshop it shows the stadium, Catalina High School just above and left of the stadium (in truth about 3 miles past it!), Tucson Medical Center upper left of stadium, then the Mount Lemmon Highway which leads up the mountain in the far distance on the NE side of town. Right about where the road disappears, "Bad Dog" overlook can be seen - another favorite lookout of mine! Of course, here the mosaic is only the 1600 pixel limit wide - was more fun in the original nearly 15,000 pixels wide with the full camera resolution...

And one more shot are some of the homes creeping up the foothills of the Catalinas. I think these are about 12 miles away and you can see how they get permission to build right next to the National Forest boundary considerably up the slope of the foothills. Good thing they don't get much snow and ice here - can you imagine climbing those hills in slick weather?!

After an hour taking in a shooting the view, I headed home. It was an exciting game - the home Wildcats hanging on to a thin lead, then at the end the "Scum Devils" overtook and won the game by a single point! Next year!

Post-Thanksgiving Outing

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! I spent a quiet day with a friend up in Phoenix, but was home later in the evening much to my cats' relief!

But Friday dawned pretty darned nice, though still some thin clouds in the sky. But I had visualized a photo op of the nearly full moon rising over the Tucson valley. Where is the best place to observe such a thing? My immediate thought was to shoot it from Kitt Peak, the moon rising over the profile of the Catalina Mountains and the city lights.

That is about the way it worked out - an uneventful ride to arrive at sunset, and set up 2 tripods for 2 lenses (500mm and 200mm) and 2 cameras (Canon 6D and XSi). Pretty much as soon as it got dark enough to take some exposures of the city lights with each lens, the glow identifying the moonrise position came into view! In making these images, I combined the long-ish exposures of the city lights with a shorter exposure properly exposed for the moon. So it is sort of an High Dynamic Range (HDR) exposure to record details much different in brightness. At left is the slightly wider view with the 200mm lens, and at right the 500mm, taken a few seconds later.

It was amazing how fast the moon rose above the profile of the Catalinas, but the clouds really add to the images. In the end, it pretty much turned out like I had envisioned... And with that image the only one on the program, with packing up of gear, I was back in town before 8pm! An early night!

Chiricahua Bound!

Have been back at "Ketelsen West" for nearly a month now... Still suffer from lack of inspiration to blog, though I've got loads to put up! Case in point is this trip to Chiricahua National Monument, that I visited 2 weeks ago now! My friend Laurie needled me to get out and observe that Saturday evening and since the Chiricahuas are a favorite of us both, we hit the road early afternoon for the 2 hour trip.

We got there a little before sunset, and drove up "Rhyolite Canyon" along some beautiful scenery. Fall colors were a little past peak among the sycamores along the canyon bottom, but still the rock formations formed of compressed ash from a long-extinct volcano were quite spectacular! Rock formations at left, and that is Laurie at right...


I hustled to set up the mount at Echo
Canyon parking lot - the plan was to mount the 500mm Canon camera lens to do some astrophotography for part of the night. Once set up, we both adjourned to Massai Point a half mile south for another project. I've always had a "thing" for the rock formation 5 miles to the north - the perfect profile of the Indian chief Cochise. While I've shot it many times before during the day, I was hoping to use the 4-day old moon's illumination to make it stand out a bit in the dark. At left is a shot right about sunset. Then after aligning the mount to Polaris and taking some sky flats, I returned to shoot Cochise with stars wheeling overhead. I found out that the moon was way too dim to even assist with locating the rock formation in the dark! I persevered and managed to take a passable frame.


Returning to Echo Canyon, Laurie worked on some wide-field shots of the sky, and I took three series of exposures on 3 objects of interest (to me, anyway!). First up was a dark nebula along the Milky Way in the constellation Cepheus. Shown at left, the dark nebula is known as the Seahorse Nebula, from its distinctive shape. Its catalog name is Barnard 150.  Also at left is a spiral galaxy NGC 6946, unusual for being located so near the Milky Way. It is relatively bright, and only 23 million light years distant - relatively close! And not to be forgotten, at lower left is a star cluster, NGC 6939, well within our own galaxy, a mere 4,000 light years distant.  This frame is about an hour of stacked exposures with the 500mm lens and like all exposures here, north is up.

The next object was a "bright" comet, almost directly overhead. If it wasn't so close to Beta Andromeda (itself a guidepost to finding the Andromeda Galaxy) it might be harder to find. But being just north of Beta, I just put the bright star in the lower edge of the field and shot away - there it was, glowing green! This comet is 64P Swift-Gehrels, making a close appearance to the earth - only 43 million miles from the earth, and 130 million miles from the sun (the earth is about 93 million miles from the sun). The green glow is caused by solar radiation dissociating carbon molecules from the comet's nucleus, which glows green in the vacuum of space... The sharp-eyed among you might note a fuzzy spot just upper left from Beta Andromeda at the lower edge. That is NGC 404, long a test object to see if your telescope reveals it so close to a bright star. This is 10.5 minutes of stacked exposures.


My last object for the night was a pair of "bright" nebula (as opposed to dark, seen by silhouette), also adjacent to a bright star. In this case, the bright star is Gamma Cassiopeia - the bright "W" currently on its side in the northeastern sky. Gamma is the center star of the "W", and the photo at left reveals some diffuse glows near it. The intense radiation of the star excites the gas to glow by fluorescence, as well as the radiation pressure pushing back the gas to form "sharp" formations pointed towards the star. I've seen photos of these (IC 63 and IC 59 left and right) thru big telescopes, but didn't know if it was possible in a "mere" telephoto lens.  This is 16 minutes of stacked exposures...

With the early sunset, we got in all the above observing, packed up and hit the road for the Tucson return about 10:30, hitting home about 12:30 - a productive night for the limited time on-sky!

Addendum!
I asked Laurie to send along her photo of
the wide-field shot of comet 65P Swift-Gehrels that also included the Andromeda Galaxy. Shown at left is a stack of 6 frames of 4 minutes total exposure taken with her T3i APS sensor camera with my 200mm lens. Please ignore the magenta halos around stars - they can sometimes be removed by adjusting focus slightly, but harder to remove in post-processing!

And at left is a labeled version - north is approximately at upper left... Note how obviously the greenish tint of the comet makes it so apparent! Unfortunately, it doesn't work when finding it visually as our eyes aren't sensitive enough to see colors on faint objects!