Red Gate Bridge!

Twas' a beautiful day at "Ketelsen East" - beautiful blue skies and temps in mid to upper 40s! I know - in January! I took the opportunity to go to the carwash to scrub the salt and grime off the car as it is supposed to be dry for a couple days. I also needed to take a little walk and decided to explore Red Gate Bridge - built a couple years ago and used most every day, but have never gone to explore further.

Interestingly, when Melinda and I married here 10 years ago, to cross the Fox River (yes, to those from AZ where washes are dry 11 months of the year - a real river that always has water) one had to drive 4 miles north to Elgin or 4 miles south to St Charles.  How did we ever survive that!? In those 10 years they have built a bridge at Stearns Road, about 2 miles north, and this one, Red Gate, about a mile south.


Red Gate Bridge is a beauty! Most bridges are just that - utility above all. But Red Gate, whether required because of space limitations or what, has a curved approach from both directions! For some reason that makes it look much more gracious and elegant, if you could ever use those words for a bridge. At left is a photo from well up the east bank to get an overall view of the approach and crossing, and at right is a plaque on the entrance to the pedestrian crossing.


Of course it is also the only bike crossing in the area, and connects with paths on both sides of the Fox River. And I always love to go out on these pedestrian/bike crossings to get the view up and downriver. At left the approach to the pedestrian path is shown. Interestingly, a couple minutes later as I stopped to take photos, the suspended path bounced up and down considerably as folks walked their dogs and otherwise crossed the river. I expected it but was stronger than I thought! At right is an HDR (combination of 3 frames to show extremes of shadows and highlights) showing interesting patterns between vertical roadway supports and diagonal details of suspended path.


I love looking out over the river, as long sight lines (not interrupted by trees, residences or power lines) give clear views of the water, wildlife and river traffic (in warmer weather!). Didn't look down south into the sun (hanging low in this midwinter month), but looked north towards where I live. At left is a 6-frame mosaic with a 200mm telephoto taken from mid-river. "Ketelsen East is up just around the bend a little on the east (right) bank. From the east end of the bridge, I took another photo that had a clear shot to the grounds here. At right is shown a full-resolution to the almost exactly 1 mile to my place. The tan and pink buildings are on the grounds of the camp here and in fact, if you click on the photo, you can see the volleyball net to right center that is literally 50 feet from my house! I believe my place is blocked from my neighbors to the south or other neighborhood construction.


As I was leaving, I took yet another multi-frame panorama (still with 200mm telephoto) of the Red Gate Water Tower built a couple years ago. I took the first above photo from adjacent to the tower. I hope you agree that Red Gate is a beauty - sorry it has taken so long to document it here!

The Silly Goose and Other Views of Spring

From the paucity of posts, you might well think I'm out of business. I'm only lacking in inspiration to post, not in content! In fact, since my last post (was it really 3 months ago?!) I've gone from "Ketelsen East" to Tucson, and back again! Have been enjoying the emerging Spring for several weeks already and taken a road trip to visit family and friends in the Carolinas... So yes, I have content...

So on this trip east, I lucked out - arrived to the Midwest 2 DAYS after the last of the snow melted! For the last week of April I was shocked at the lack of signs of new growth other than daffodils... But it was soon to bust out! Fortunately there were other signs of a new season. Canada Geese now overwinter, and get an early start on a new crop. Interestingly, you rarely see the nests except for this one I saw on my daily trip to pick up a morning paper - in the middle of a Jewel/Osco parking lot! I was taken aback when I first spotted her, but sure enough she was stuck on her nest like glue. So much so that the store staff had spotted her and left bread crusts for her to eat. Note on the image at right there are at least 2 goslings hanging w/mom while the last eggs hatch. The next day as I drove up (without camera), mom, dad and 5 babes were waddling to edge of the lot to cross the street to a pond. So despite the iffy location, there appeared to be a successful conclusion!

Meanwhile on the grounds of "Ketelsen East", there are always groups of geese coming in off the Fox River. Shooting out the open window, I caught a group of goslings and their mom caught in a brief downpour. From first image to last, only about 6 minutes had passed. As it first started raining the babes all ran to mom, who spread her wings to protect them all from the brief downpour. As soon as it stopped, one peeked out and before you knew it, they all went about their business! The image at right is a blowup of the 3rd image showing them all piled under mom. I believe all 9 goslings are there under her!




As I said above, there wasn't much of a wait for the yard to brighten up. Among the first is the Blue Scilla - a favorite of mind, tinting the lawn blue in places! These strange downward-pointing flowers are tough to photograph - even when on the ground pointing horizontally not much of the flower can be seen! But the bright color is a welcome early harbinger of Spring! The image at left is a 7-frame focus-stack to extend the full flower into focus. At right is a wider view of the yard showing the day or two of the lawn dominated by the scilla before the red trillium starting coming in too. Interesting how they all come, bloom and go sort of one-at-a time!




Yes, trillium is always a favorite of mine - but so tough to image... I've done images of both the red and white trillium before, but decided to do an ultra-close-up of the white trillium this time. At left is the wider view showing the 3 petals of the flower, and at right is actually the same image, but shown at full-resolution showing flower parts and pollen-laden anthers. In both of these, 25 frames w/a slight focus shift between were combined to extend the depth of field of the image... It continues to amaze me how much resolution you can squeeze out of an image using focus-stacking techniques!





And surprisingly, there were NO dandelions for the first two weeks of my stay! I always thought that they were among the first of the flower/weeds to appear in the yard, but obviously the blue scilla and trillium won out this year... I enjoy stalking the dandelions, hunting the tiny little aphids that feed on nectar in the flower... Tiny, but suitably challenging to capture! This time I was loaded for bear - had 2 different systems to track them down - my regular macro plus extension tubes to get as large as possible, and also, this time borrowed an infinity-corrected microscope objective shooting in front of a 200mm lens for a comparable 2X view. Here are the two results - both of these are focus-stacks of a half-dozen frames. At left is the 100mm Canon macro lens with about 6 cm of extension tubes. At right is the 2X microscope objective in front of a 200mm lens. While the results are comparable, the edge goes to the macro/extension tubes as the depth of field is a little larger and the hardware (as mine is set up) is a bit easier to use. Further study is warranted!




And after the blue scilla and still during the dandelions, the violets came out too. They seem so innocuous, and yet, under a macro lens seem so mysterious and different compared to other flowers.  At left is a "wide" shot showing mostly just a flower petal and the subtle color veining. At right is the center of the flower where the numerous "fingers" obviously guide the pollinators for maximum effectiveness... Both of these are focus stacks - 5 frames for the petal at left, 10 for the close-up at right...








And there were some new ones for me too - neighbor Elaine was pointing out the population of flowers in her yard and identified these large-leaved forest dwellers near the fence line as "May Apples", indeed some forming small "apples" about 1.5 cm diameter on the stalks under them. And sure enough, some of them also sported striking flowers, but instead of atop the plants, they were on the stem well protected by the leaves! Kind of weird, but worth lying on the ground to get a close up of the flowers with the macro. These were taken after a rain, but they looked a little "waxy", which might have been a product of the rinsing they had...





The weather these weeks has just been fabulous! It has been cool - cold enough to support making a batch of chili one weekend! Have not yet used the AC, and in fact, many mornings have had to use the heat to get the house into the 60s! We've had long stretches of clear sky, so that watching the spinning of the spheres across the sky are an entertaining pastime! At left is the rising moon showing over the barely-budding trees 3 weeks ago! Note that even this photo is not a simple one to take! Shooting with the 300mm lens, to keep the trees in focus, as well as the moon required 3 exposures - one for the tree at left w/the buds, then a middle-range shot for the other trees, then third exposure focused on the moon - the most distant object - duh! Photoshop assembled the 3-frame focus stack easily, keeping the sharp parts of each of the 3 exposures to combine into this one!

And we've also had some rainy weather, which to this desert rat is just as welcome as a sunny day! Sleeping with the temps in the 50s or 60s with the windows open during a storm is just heavenly!  Although I have to ask - is there anything sadder than a dandelion seed pod after a heavy rain, as shown at right?

Back to "Ketelsen West" soon, where I hope to catch up on some of the content I've been collecting. Don't give up on me!

My Night-Time Buddies!

The Summer monsoon weather pattern has been hanging on for dear life - "good for the corn" as they used to say in the Midwest with near-daily clouds and rain, but bad for the stars and photon-deprived amateur astronomers around here! What is an observer of the universe expected to do? Well, like in Illinois when I switch to lookin' at bugs in the backyard, there are similar subjects here in Tucson. Fortunately, late monsoon season is a good time for the spectacular flowers of cereus repandus - night bloomers with flowers up to 15cm (6") in diameter! It is sometimes tough to tell very far in advance when they'll bloom - at left is one about to open, shown near sunset. Yet a mere 3.5 hours later, it is transformed to the image at right.

But while the flowers are beautiful, what is interesting to me are the visitors that come by during the night. Almost magically, about a half hour after fully opening, the moths start drifting in to feed on the nectar and help pollinate the plants. It is the transitory appearance that is of interest to me. I've blogged about them many times, starting with the time-lapse I made back in 2012. Back then taking only 20 frames/hour, I was lucky to catch one moth during the night.  Close examination of the time lapse indicated from flower movement that many more were visiting while not exposing. Since then I've upped the frame count up to 240 per hour and now am seeing 20 or more during the night - a busy location indeed! Something to note is what they accomplish during the night - at left is the near-virginal flower enlarged from the right image above. Note the clean greenish central stigma, and the anthers loaded up with pollen. Of course, far down the throat of the flower is where the nectar is located that the moths crave. The image at right shows the stigma after only 8 moth visits over the course of an hour.  The sticky stigma is "dirty" with the shed scales of the moth, as well as pollen from this as well as other plants carried by the pollinators.

Over the course of the night this continues with dozens of moth visits. The large tubular flowers require pollinators with a long proboscis to reach down the flower to where the nectar is located deep in the flower. Note the long probes of the moths seen (and blogged) previously here, as well as here. This year I might have caught my best proboscis picture, shown at left. You can see the length exceeds their wingspan by a considerable amount. You can also see how far in they "attack" the flower - from the image at right (a different moth) they can reach considerably far down the neck of the flower!  Note also the moth at right has some wing damage - it doesn't seem to affect its flying characteristics much, and would actually serve a useful purpose to identify future visits to the yard...

And if you'll indulge me a few more images (got lots of 'em now!) at left is another great proboscis shot, though the moth is mostly out of focus. Still, you would think they have to be careful as they come in for docking - damaging that thing would likely affect its feeding significantly! At right is the best view I've had of the proboscis base - note that it is actually a pair of tubes! I've not noticed this before, nor know the purpose, but find it quite interesting... Almost all of these images that includes their eyeballs shows a "catseye" effect. If you shine a flashlight or take a picture of them, the lens focuses the light on their retina and there is a beam that comes directly back to the viewer. It is an easy way to find your cats in the dark yard - shine your flashlight around and look for the glow from their eyes. Works for moths too!

Note that all of these moths are the same species! The 3 orange spots down the thorax indicate manduca rustica - the rustic sphinx moth, with a classic image shown at left. I've never caught any another species until last Sunday evening at 10:48, the 3rd moth to visit the blossom along the house. Shown at right it looked pretty similar, perhaps slightly smaller, though it had pink spots down its side! Submitting it for an ID request to Bug Guide, by morning I had an answer! Interestingly, it is called a pink-spotted hawk moth, or Agrius cingulate. I only captured the one image of it, but is the only non-rustic that I captured of 32 moth-visits over one and a half nights of imaging, and of course, over my previous sessions over the years. Rare for me, anyway!

Note that nearly all of these images were taken with a timer - I set it up to take images every 20 seconds on 30 August, and every 15 seconds on 2 September. It resulted in 1300+ images on the first night and 640 over about 3 hours the later. But the return of 32 moth visits was pretty good in my book (a little under 2%). As modern shooters are fond of saying - "digital film is cheap" - it isn't like we've got to pay for film and processing these days! Still, as a result, most of of the images are "accidental". Short of sitting in a chair and pushing the button manually or devising some sort of "moth detector", I can't see doing much better. I actually did have one come visit while I was checking the camera and caught 6 images over its 33 second visit by pushing the button myself. Shown at left in the montage, the number indicates the elapsed time in seconds after the first image. It shows that the moth made several "lunges" at the flower, presumably to reposition its proboscis and assist in feeding.

 I almost forgot!  On Sunday evening there was a full moon, and before heading to bed I tried to take one by the light of the full moon instead of the on-camera flash, like all the others. The result is at right - pretty good, thought the narrow depth of field tells you I opened up the aperture to its maximum 2.8 for the 30 second exposure.

As I've noticed before, the moths stop coming by about a half-hour before sunrise, and minutes later the bees arrive and do their thing till the flower closes an hour or so after sunrise. See the animated clip in the second paragraph to see for yourself. As I was taking a few close-ups before dawn, I shot the bee at left, shown at full camera resolution. Note the anthers, so packed with pollen early in the evening, are mostly bare here. Seen in drifts on some of the photos above, where did it end up? Well, at right is shown an 18 (!) frame focus stack of a cropped, extreme close-up of the stigma after a long night of pollinators. Besides the dark-looking straws (scales) from the moths, they are packed in spherical pollen grains, eventually to be seeds in the ripening fruit.

Anyway, the flowers and their pollinators are suitable distractions for observers looking for details! Give it a try - likely it will clear up eventually and show us some twinkly lights. But in the meantime - "gotta make some hay while the sun shines" - another Midwestern adage!


EDIT: I forgot to mention in this post that an earlier-in-the-summer blooming, only 3 months earlier hadn't brought ANY pollinators! At the end of May, a full night of camera monitoring showed nothing came by, not even the honeybees at the end of the night... Nothing sadder than an unused, unpollinated flower... Given the visitors we have this time of year, obviously the earlier blooming was before these pollinators were active in their life cycle...

Ringy Dingy!

We've had cloudy skies most of the day, and also have a 10-day-old gibbous Moon tonight, so figured I had little to no chance of coming up with a blog post, but what do you know - stepped outside to pick up cat food bowls and found a really nice ring around the moon!

This 22 degree halo is caused by moonlight (or sunlight during the daytime) refracting through two surfaces of hexagonal ice crystals in the clouds. Longer wavelengths are refracted a little less, so the inside of the halo shows a red fringe. This is an 8 second exposure with wide angle zoom set to 14mm, and really approximates the visual appearance pretty well. Ain't optics wonderful!?

Fortunately it is clear enough to see a few other objects along the red-fringed ring and moon. Brilliant Jupiter is up at the 10 o'clock position from the moon, and there are a few stars too. At left just inside the ring at 8 o'clock is Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, and also just inside the ring at 3 o'clock is Procyon (Alpha Canis Minoris). At the top of the image, splitting the ring are Castor and Pollus (top to bottom), in Gemini. Just in case you can't see all that, I'm providing a labeled version at right. I lucked out to find an astronomy-themed subject tonight - yippee!

Lost And Found!

I take a lot of photos, likely over 10K per year, especially with time lapses and stacking of astronomical images. Most are what I think would make good blog posts, and it is certainly easy to take lots of pictures these days without the cost of film or processing!  At the same time, I find that if I don't get them in the blog queue right away, they get lost under more recent images and get forgotten. 

While walking along the river the other day (we're still in Illinois), a set of IR images I took this summer came to mind.  In infrared wavelengths, water is a good absorber, looking mostly dark in images unless you get a reflection.  The above image shows the Wood effect clearly - very bright vegetation from the trees on the far bank.  But what came to my attention was the light streaks in the water at the bottom.  Turns out the Fox River is very shallow at this point, only about 25cm (10 inches).  What was coming into view was the river equivalent of seaweed or moss, growing in long strings.  Taking longer exposures, it took a couple shots for me to expose long enough for details, shown here at right and left.  It took about 10X the exposure to bring out the white-glow of the underwater plants.  In the shallows the local current carried the sinuous plants downstream, and getting a couple shots with different patterns was easy to do.  It made for interesting patterns, and it is also interesting to see how murkey the water looks due to the water absorbing the IR wavelengths.

Back in August our barrel cactus was in
full bloomin' mode.  While the buds were easy to catch, looking photogenic for several days before popping into flower, by the time I get back from work, they've been open all day and are well-worn from pollinators.  In any case, these pair of images were taken with a macro, with at least 6 frames taken at different focus settings to combine into the final focus-stacked images.  Clicking on the right image you can see how the stigma are wiped clear of pollen on the outward-facing side.

In October, my friend Bob Taylor invited me up for an observing session at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.  I'd posted many images, but had taken a series of sky exposures that for some reason weren't up to my standards.  However, as a result, one of the highlights of the all-night session, of the Gegenshein clearing the pre-dawn horizon didn't make it into the blog.  Shown here at left, the conical glow in the sky is not from the rising sun, but rather sunlight reflecting off dust from comets and asteroids in the plane of the solar system.  Following the ecliptic path, it shoots right up towards and engulfing Jupiter, the bright object at upper right.  Visible nearly all year long from a dark sky, it is especially visible in the northern hemisphere in the early Fall morning sky and the early Spring evening sky when the ecliptic makes a large angle to the horizon.  And since I don't like unlabeled star fields, I've included an annotated version at right, including the outline of Mount Graham at lower left, an antenna array at bottom center, and the red-lit antennae 5 miles distant at Mount Bigelow.

So I'm glad I re-discovered these images that hadn't appeared here before.  Certainly worthy of blog-inclusion!

The Window Seat!

We're safely back in the Midwest after another cross-country flight.  While never ho-hum, I guess we do take travel for granted.  It is so convenient to take the noon non-stop to O'Hare and be there in 3 hours!  Travel isn't much fun with overcrowded planes and going through security, but it was more pleasant this time.  For some reason, Melinda has for some time gotten the "TSA Pre-check" stamp on her boarding pass, allowing her to pretty much walk onto the plane while I took my shoes off and unpacked the computer every time.  This time, somehow I qualified and got to do the same - it was great!  And while over 6 feet tall, sitting next to the window isn't always the best place to look out the window (at about elbow level), this time I pretty much used the window as my personal space to look out on the country as we made the trip.

Remember the old days (a month or three ago!) when a digital camera wasn't an approved electronic device and they had to be off for takeoff and landing?  Fortunately it is allowed now, so was using the camera the entire trip.  While mostly clear, hot and humid after the recent rains, there were a lot of clouds hugging the ground, even in the Desert Southwest.  Check out this shot of the Willcox Playa (dry lake bed) about 80 miles SE of Tucson.  Even while we were still climbing, we were far above most of the low clouds.  The lake bed is atop the frame, and there is lots of irrigation and crops in the Sulphur Springs Valley section shown here.  Would have always like to see Mount Graham and the LBT telescope out the left side of the plane, but we were on the right side. 

We had clouds for a while, but one of the advantages of flying this same route every couple months is that you start to recognize the route!  Crossing into west-central New Mexico it cleared in time for me to spot Socorro, easy to pick out because of interstate 25 and the Rio Grande River running down past it.  Yes, this is the same Rio Grande that continues south and acts as the southern border of Texas and the U.S. border with Mexico...

I read the paper for a while through the boring parts of northern Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, and then spotted Kansas City in the Missouri River Valley.  While I've posted the KC airport before, not the downtown area, so here it is... I actually briefly mistook the Topeka airport for the KC version until we flew the additional couple minutes.  That is the Missouri meandering through the lower left corner of the image, with the Kansas River joining in from the right.

Coming up on another big river, I figured it was the Mississippi, and sure enough, it was the first time I've recorded the southernmost point of Iowa.  This 3-frame mosaic, taken in short order and assembled in Microsoft ICE, shows the Des Moines River emptying into the Mississippi.  The town located there is Keokuk, Iowa, adjacent to a lock and dam.  It is interesting how much muddier the Des Moines is, as you can see the color difference as it enters the Mississippi.  Also interestingly, while the Des Moines River marks the boundary between Missouri and Iowa here, evidently the survey followed an old course of the river - comparing it on Google, the border doesn't follow the current river course!  The crescent shaped woods on the right side of the Des Moines River is actually in Iowa!

Continuing on into Illinois, we cross a big wind farm most every time, then come up on the Illinois River.  I didn't realize how busy a waterway the Illinois was.  In the space of a few minutes, I spotted a couple barges plying what looked to be a pretty narrow waterway.  And it is one thing to be working upstream where you can fight the current, but going downstream, one needs to move faster than the current to maneuver - it has to be scary given how narrow the channel is.  Shown at left is a barge moving downstream past Ottawa.  I didn't think much of it until I checked Google maps to verify which town it was...  The Google satellite image just happened to catch a barge moving upstream past the railroad bridge shown at right - can you believe how narrow a gap there is between the pilings of the bridge?!  The railroad bridge is in the left image too, just downstream (to the right) of the barge at center.  Also of interest to us is that the Fox River, which flows past our house in St Charles, empties into the Illinois right about where the barge is located in the left image.

Before we knew it, we were in the urban buildup of the city of Chicago and the 'burbs.  At left is one of the first developed areas we saw - a subdivision built around a golf course.  It wasn't more than a few minutes later than we saw some of the older parts of town in the established cities built long ago, shown at right...  Of course, we were descending by the time these pictures were taken.  Our plane headed right towards downtown Chicago, but unfortunately banked left too late for me to shoot it out my window.  I caught the top of the Hancock building, but not much else of downtown...

So anyway, we're back in cooler temperatures, where long sleeves are mandatory in the evening.  It will be a fun time catching a bit of the transition into Fall!