Okay, I’ll try not to get too nerdy. Tonight is the Full Strawberry Moon. I got out last night because with the weather, ya never know. So my pic is with the moon at 99.1% Close enough for rock-n-roll. I’ll skip over the part of the story where a doe deer took exception to my presence, or the cute skunk family I saw—three really cute babies, nor the part of how I had to crawl around on my belly like a snake—in the same places where the Canada geese walk—to get this shot. I’ve been studying and working on a technique for taking vertical panoramas. And although it doesn’t show in the image, thankfully, it was shot from a single camera position, with 6 rows of pictures all (neatly) stitched together. Marshall Lake, Sagamore Hills, Ohio, Rokinon 14mm on Nikon D850.
Enjoy the image. I have to go finish some laundry,
After a few nights of air-you-can wear, it was comforting to have to dig out the puffy jacket while gazing at the stars. No skunks this evening. I suppose they’re not back from their field trip to Washington D.C. for the big birthday bash. The coyotes were practicing for their summer concert series. I really like their rendition of, “‘Till We Eat Again.” A real classic. My focus last night was on M5, a globular cluster found in the constellation of Serpens. It’s thought to be one of the older (13 billion years old), certainly larger, of the globulars, about 25 million lightyears away. It contains an estimated 500,000 stars. The red/orange stars you see here are old, the blue ones new. If our sun were part of this cluster it would be so dull we could not find it. That bright star to the lower left is 5 Serpentis—a huge subgiant, twice the radius of our sun. Image made with SeeStar S30 scope, 480 stacked images. Post processing in SeeStar. Okay, I got a bit nerdy. Not much else going on until tomorrow. Stay tuned.
It started out innocently enough—no one would get hurt, no laws would be broken. Well, maybe one or two, but they were small laws. All I had to do was drop my friend at the designated spot, then (quickly) pick him up when he called. He even bribed me with a couple doughnuts to do this before he told me what we’d be doing.
There’s been a plethora of antique steam engine trains running through Northeast Ohio these past couple weeks. Les (his real name) has been chasing and photographing them. Now, again, he had found the perfect vantage point—maybe. However, avoiding national park rangers (to say nothing of needing a mountain goat in your family history) might be an issue. So, when I agreed to drive the getaway car, (and eat the doughnuts) he sent me photos and aerial images to where this would/could happen. I looked over the info, and other pix I found online, and realized what was missing from all the pictures—action. Movement.
Let me say, being the driver is not the kind of thing you ask some dude who has been a photojournalist for more than 50 years (plus retirement years) to do. Be the driver? The driver? No way. I wanted to be a shooter.
Other than mosquitos trying to eat us alive, things went as planned, until the cops showed up. To protect the guilty I’ll skip the part of how we avoided arrest, but we were suddenly faced with finding a new shooting spot—with the train heading our way. The train was the historic steam locomotive, Nickel Plate Road 765, pulling vintage passenger cars through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
We had to hurry! Let me just say, kneeling on rail track slag is not something an 84-year-old guy (with only one cup of coffee in him) should be doing. Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Plus, nobody told me this thing would be traveling faster than a speeding bullet—alble to leap tall buildings … well, you get the point. In the end, a good time was had by most.
As every seasoned birder knows, you should always be prepared for anything and everything when you’re out on the trail. Basics kit, like binoculars and camera, along with a notebook and pen, should be second (or first) nature. A couple days ago I was not prepared; no binoculars, no camera, nothing, when I had an up-close and personal encounter with an American Bald Eagle—sort of.
Here’s what happened: I was out taking my daily health walk on the nearby hike and bike trail. I was on the home stretch, thinking about a cup of tea since it was 24 degrees and windy, when about 50 yards ahead of me I saw a bald eagle coming straight for me. The bird was flying at eye level, pumping like crazy, trying to get some altitude. Gorgeous white head, black body and wings—the symbol of America coming right to me!
I froze in place, the “flight or fight” messages passed through my brain, sending mixed signals to my thinning blood. All I could manage in the thought category was, “I hope this critter knows what she’s doing and gets a bit higher.”
The bird was about 25 feet away when it suddenly banked right. I was going to yell, “chicken” when I realized it was not a bald eagle. It was a basic American Crow carrying a sandwich-size piece of white bread.
The English translation of that is, “White Head Light,” however, since this was taken on the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec, Canada, this summer, I’ll stick with the French spelling. The lighthouse overlooks the oft-photographed Rocher Perce (Pierced Rock) and Ile Bonaventure (Bonaventure Island). The island is a nesting ground for thousands of seabirds, including a colony of an estimated 80,000 Northern Gannets. (More on our visit to the colony, later.) The original light at this spot started in 1873. New lamps, improvements and replacements happened and this current structure emerged in 1915. It stands 24 feet high, stubby by most lighthouse standards, however, seated at the edge of a cliff hundreds of feet to the ocean, it projected its light 15 miles out, warning sailors of danger along the shore. Its light has been quenched, however, the memories live on.
As luck will have it, I’ve been so busy of late I haven’t had time to do anything. (Thanks for the kind words, Yogi.) I finally got around to sorting through the last of the images from the recent western trip Susan and I completed in October. One of our planned stops was the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in western Colorado. This national park is not as well known, nor heavily visited, as others in the National Park System line up, however, it is not to be missed. We were there on a gorgeous fall day and spent our time exploring the entire length of this dynamic spot, watching the sun and shadows create pictures with every turn.
About half the area (16,000 acres) are designated as wilderness, and virtually in accessible. The canyon gets its name from the fact that parts of the river receive only (on average) 33 minutes of sunlight per day. Talk about a short growing season. At its steepest point, the canyon is only about 40 feet wide at the river.
I tend not to choose a favorite spot when surround by places like the Black Canyon, so I’ll show a couple images from a spot that was as close to breathtaking as these things can get. It’s called the Painted Wall, considered the tallest wall in the canyon at 2,250 feet (yeah, about a half mile). The rocks here are about 500 million years old (give or take), mostly metamorphic and igneous. The Painted Wall has intrusions of pegmatite that look as if a giant splashed paint on a black canvas.
Witt’s End 