April 24, 2024

Hawk at Sunset

One of their favorite haunts, atop an 80ft Norfolk Island Pine, ~50yds away, 1200mm

April 23, 2024

A real President visited today

Not the best photos, hazy light from directly overhead, but I got her from 2.68nm

April 10, 2024

Seeing the unseen

I was quite bored with my eclipse photos of the sun with a bite out, so I envisioned seeing the unseen. What if we could see the little world passing before the sun? I took my all time favorite moon photo, dimmed it as though lit from earthshine, sized it to fit the arc from the eclipse, inserted it into the arc and produced a quick slideshow encompassing 1:20pm to 4:16pm in roughly 15 min increments.

View the slide show here: https://jamesdevore.smugmug.com/2024-Tampa-Eclipse

Here is a teaser photo:

April 8, 2024

with 1200mm and slightly cropped 3 of 338 from the eastern side

How it started


Max at 58%


and how it all ended

April 5, 2024

3,200-megapixel digital camera is ready for its cosmic photoshoot

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera is the size of a small car—and the biggest digital camera ever built for astronomy.

The world’s largest digital camera is officially ready to begin filming “the greatest movie of all time,” according to its makers. This morning, engineers and scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced the completion of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, a roughly 6,610-pound, car-sized tool designed to capture new information about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Following a two-decade construction process, the 3,200-megapixel LSST Camera will now travel to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory located 8,900-feet atop Chile’s Cerro Pachón. Once attached to the facility’s Simonyi Survey Telescope later this year, its dual five-foot and three-foot-wide lenses will aim skyward for a 10-year-long survey of the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and beyond.

https://www.popsci.com/science/largest-digital-camera/

March 27, 2024

Yesterday's update to my "Dinosaurs are with us" collection

The last thing many a fish see before the end.
A little difficulty with depth of field (Osprey are YUGE!) vs speed and maintaining focus, but I'll take it!

March 25, 2024

DeSantis signs ban on kids using social media

TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill blocking most kids from social media websites, setting up an expected court battle that could prevent the legislation from ever taking effect.

House Bill 3, passed by lawmakers with bipartisan support this month, forbids kids 13 and younger from creating social media accounts and requires the platforms to seek out and remove their profiles. Kids 14 and 15 would need parents’ consent.

The legislation also blocks all minors from adult websites, requiring all visitors to prove their age before viewing content.

Florida follows a handful of other states, from California to Arkansas, that have placed similar limits on kids’ social media use in response to rising rates of teen depression and suicide.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2024/03/25/florida-desantis-social-media-ban-kids-tiktok-consent/

March 22, 2024

About to move to some mirrorless macro work

but for now, playing with the new 180-600 handheld at less than 10ft.

at 600mm, 1/1000 sec, f6.3 ISO 720


at 1200mm, 1/1000, f/13, ISO 3200, but a very tiny subject and horrible background of a screen room

March 17, 2024

It's Spring Break at the Habanero House!

March 16, 2024

Saturday musings: Which dinosaurs survived?

The ones that shrank the fastest.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/122888033

thanks to tblue37 for this article, which came to mind when I took the #1 photo of the Blue Jay which looked so Jurassic. I grabbed a few representative photos of dinosaurs being dinosaurs. Be glad they got smaller.

Birds are the remnants of the fastest-evolving group of dinosaurs.
The family tree of more than 1,500! skeletal characteristics over 50 million years, shows that the theropods—the carnivorous dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus, that would eventually become birds—shrank markedly at least 12 times. Starting from an average mass of 163 kilograms, the theropod suborder eventually produced the .8 kilogram Archaeopteryx, which is considered the earliest bird.

The theropods were the only group to continually push the envelope when it came to skeletal size. It's possible that herbivores simply couldn't shrink, since a plant-based diet requires a larger gut for digestion. Meanwhile, theropods could explore alternate resources, habitats, and even prey. "It would have permitted them to chase insects, climb trees, leap and glide, and eventually develop powered flight, "All of these activities would have led to novel new anatomical adaptations." So as the dinosaurs shrank, their other features evolved more quickly (which led to faster shrinking to take advantage of these new abilities, and so on).