A few snaps of All Saints’ Church, Cottenham, with the stellar backdrop of the Milky Way. In the third picture down, you can see the light trail of a satellite I spotted as I was framing up. Milky Way is perhaps most obvious in the last photo.
For those interested in such things, these were all shot with ISO set to 1600, a focal length of between 24 and 105mm and an f-stop of 4.0. Shutter speed was varied to accommodate the 500/fl rule, whereby you divide 500 by the focal length to obtain the maximum speed that will avoid star trails appearing as the Earth turns on its axis. At 24mm, a shutter speed above 20 seconds will clearly show star trails.
If some of these are not perfectly sharp or framed, blame my freezing hands, it’s minus F out there tonight…
In mid-October I spotted a bird I didn’t recognise scooting along Cottenham Lode. It looked mostly black/very dark-brown but with a white rump and a square tail. It was a quick flyer shooting along the fen drain close to the water’s surface. I’d say it was just a little smaller than a swift and with a similarly sickle-shaped wing profile; but the swifts were long gone by this time of the year. I thought maybe it was a seabird, but that felt unusual we’re just outside Cambridge miles from the coast. Perhaps it was a migrant blown off course by the strong winds we called “ex-Ophelia” at the time. I didn’t get a photo.
Members of the RSPB forum had various suggestions, but it was my trusty ornithological mentor on Facebook, Brian Stone, who recognised it from the description and told me it was most likely a green sandpiper. I saw the same bird again a few nights ago, it was almost dark, but it was definitely the same species. I got a very noisy snap as it passed over a patch of light on the Lode.
I sent the picture to Brian who confirmed it, even from this awful photo, as a green sandpiper (Tringa ochropus). He pointed out that it’s a common visitor to the fen drains in winter, and on passage). The green sandpiper is a wader (a shorebird). It breeds across subarctic Europe and Asia and is a migratory bird, wintering in southern Europe, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and tropical Africa. It eats small invertebrates plucked from the shoreline mud. Almost uniquely for a wader it nests in trees although will often adopt a used thrush’s nest as its home.
According to the RSPB its call is a loud “tllu-eet weet-weet!”
The RSPB/BTO/WWT state of the UK’s birds report is out now. Here’s the exec summary cribbed from the RSPB’s press release.
Climate change is helping some species, hindering others.
Bird abundance and distribution are changing, more reaching further north.
Some migratory birds are arriving earlier. Swallows get her two weeks sooner than they did in the 1960s.
Species that prefer warmer climes but don’t migrate are beginning to settle on our shores, e.g. little bittern and night heron. Garganey, quail, and little egret already on the increase.
Rare breeding birds, such as dotterel, whimbrel, common scoter, and Slavonian grebe, will be at greater risk of extinction in the UK as conditions change.
Sandeel numbers are down which means kittiwake population are declining. Will affect Arctic skua, Arctic tern, and puffin too.
National surveys show capercaillie and hen harriers down.
*Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, British Trust for Ornithology, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust
My good friend Paul Sutherland alerted his Facebook cohort to the upcoming spectacle of the Geminid meteor shower. My immediate thought was what settings do I need to use with my camera having dabbled with astrophotography earlier this week. Thankfully, Suthers has me covered and saves me from having to write a full “HowTo”. Check out his guide to photographing a meteor shower here.
As with astrophotography, you will need a camera on a nice sturdy tripod. The camera must have the ability to control shutter speed and to have a time delay or a remote shutter control/cable release. It also needs to have a manual focus option.
So, what are we going to snap? The Geminids, that’s what. The Geminids are fragments of the object 3200 Phaethon which is probably a Palladian asteroid going around the sun in a “rock comet” orbit. Earth coincides with its path in December and those fragments that enter the atmosphere will burn up as “shooting stars”. Not due to friction but due to their high speed compressing the air in front of them and so heating it up to melting temperatures.
On a clear night, somewhere dark, away from streetlights etc, between December 4th and 17th (perhaps optimal will be 13th, 14th when they peak) point your camera on its tripod towards the constellation of Gemini. Use a wide angle. Live, manually focus on the stars. Set your ISO to between 800 and 1600. Widest aperture (smallest f-stop) possible and shutter speed based on the 500-rule to avoid capture motion of the stars due to Earth’s rotation. For a 20mm focal length, 500/20 = 25s maximum shutter speed.
At their peak, there will be a couple of shooting stars every minute from 10 pm onwards. Keep your eyes peeled, Once you’ve seen a few, you should be able to figure out their point of origin in that part of the sky in which the constellation Gemini lies. Adjust the angle and direction of your camera to capture the shooting star trails emanating from this point.
If you have a DSLR, there will likely be a cable release. If there’s an automated one you could set the camera up to fire a couple of times a minute all night and go to bed. It’ll keep shooting until the battery charge runs out. Some cameras will have Wi-Fi and an app that lets you control the camera via the internet and thus your smartphone, tablet, or PC. I’m just investigating as to whether the app for my Canon 6D lets one set up a scheduled regular shutter release so I can get a good night’s sleep while the camera does the work of watching the meteor shower.
NB Protect your camera from condensation and the weather outside and when you bring it back indoors.
There’s a piece in The Graun about somebody finding a lobster with an imprint of a drinks can logo on its claw…very strange…and, of course, the paper makes it an excuse to discuss the growing problem of waste in our oceans; which is fine there is a problem.
But, it also reports that the discoverer of this lobster recognised the logo immediately because she: “drinks as many as 12 cans of the [brown, sugar solution] a day”.
[I’ve changed reference to the product to avoid giving them any extra free publicity, obvs.]
But, WTF? 12 cans? Do people really drink that volume of this flavoured water? Didn’t anyone think to check whether the “discovery” was just a PR stunt? Looks like it to me…
That said, it’s not the logo of that particular drinks brand anyway, is it? It looks like there’s the eye from a dollar bill below the blue band…that’s not part of their logo. If it’s genuine perhaps a piece of printed plastic sheeting with that logo on it got pressed against the animal’s claw and the ink came off. They don’t do “Billy Stampers” for marine crustaceans, do they?
I blogged and posted photos of starscapes I shot last on a chilly November night this week at about 11 pm. Here’s the executive summary for getting a sharp photo without star trails caused by Earth’s rotation. It was a clear night, but there was a quarter moon so not perfect conditions, best to shoot after moonset or when there’s a new moon. Also, make sure minimal domestic lighting on and away from streetlights. (Protect your camera from cold and damp if you’re outside for a long time and from condensation when you bring it back indoors).
Fix wide angle lens, e.g. 20mm-105mm or prime, to the camera.
Mount camera on a sturdy tripod, pointing up at the stars of interest. Milky Way, a constellation etc.
Set camera’s white balance to tungsten.
Open up the aperture as wide as it will go – lowest f-stop for the lens and camera. f.4.0 was what my Canon lens could manage at 20mm.
Set ISO to about 1600, but lower it, if you get a lot of purple speckly noise.
Make the shutter speed no slower than 500/focal length, for 20mm that would be 25 seconds. That avoids star trails. If brightest stars look too blown out, shorten the shutter time.
Manually focus.
Set a shutter time delay or use a cable release or app to take the shot.
If you can find somewhere dramatic, like a mountain range, all the better. I made do with the roofline of our houses as a context to the sky.
There’s an orange-haired huntsman spider that has the scientific name Heteropoda davidbowie…now there’s a triumvirate of microbes (specifically, parabasalian protist flagellates) named after the members of Canadian power trio Rush:
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Pseudotrichonympha leei, P. lifesoni, and P. pearti
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These symbiotic protists play a key role in the ability of termites to digest wood. These unusual microbes also contain an internal rotating structure that scientists really don’t understand. In the research paper, the team reports that the species form “patterns both so grand and complex” (quoting from the Rush song Natural Science), they also use the phrase “spiral array” later in the same section of their research paper, also a phrase from that song.
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The paper is otherwise quite serious and in the taxonomic summary, the team refers to the etymology of the names:
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“Species name refers to Geddy Lee [bassist/singer], a musician who, with other members of Rush [guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer/lyricist Neil Peart], have inspired an interest in natural history and science through art.”
We’ve all seen those amazing shots of the Milky Way with some stunning vista, an enormous bridge, mountains, a rainforest…well, there’s not a lot of that around here but I fancied shooting the stars.
Basic things: you need a tripod, a remote shutter control or the ability to set a shutter release timer, and a fully manual camera with manual focus. It’s best to dial in the settings indoors before you step out into a chilly November night. Also, it’s best to choose a moon-free night and to be somewhere with low light pollution. Easier said than done, of course.
Anyway, set the white balance on the camera to tungsten for best results. Choose an ISO of about 1600 and an f-stop (aperture) as low as it will go (bigger aperture in other words). With my 24-105mm on my Canon 6D I could stop it down to f/4.
Now, here’s the science bit. Because you’re going to need a long exposure, several seconds to get a good exposure, the earth will have rotated a little bit during the exposure and the stars will look like short light trails. Now, you could make this a feature of your photo. Aim at the pole star and set a really long exposure and you will get those fancy circular trails. But if you want nice starry pinpoints, you need to use a rule of thumb to avoid light trails. The rule of thumb is to divide 500 by the focal length you’re using and that’s the maximum number of seconds you can expose before star trails will become apparent. I was planning to shoot at 24 mm focal length, so 20 seconds or less would be about right (as it turned out 15 seconds was best with the f-stop and ISO I’d set.
Set your camera up on the tripod, align it with a patch of sky you wish to photograph and manually focus to get the stars looking as sharp as you can (You might have to zoom in and focus unless there’s a particularly bright star in your patch of sky and then zoom out again without changing the focus). Set the camera to timer mode (10s works best rather than 2s, to let the camera settle after pressing the shutter release) or use a shutter cable or wireless remote.
Post-processing can boost a photo. Here’s one I took at the local church with a heavenly backdrop that reveals more of the stars
We made an impromptu trip to Stiffkey on the North Norfolk coast, stopped overnight at the Red Lion Inn, it was almost dark by the time we got there but there were lots of loose flocks (skeins) of geese coming home to roost on the marshes. The initial attractor had been rumours of waxwings around the car park near our old stamping ground High Sands Campsite.
Redshank (Tringa totanus)
An earlyish breakfast the next morning had us legging it to that area in search of Bombycilla garrulus, none to be seen but a big flock of linnets was chasing around the neighbouring hedgerows, we could hear lots of curlews (in flight directly below this paragraph) and could see pale-bellied Brent goose, red shank (pictured above), little egret, kestrel, stonechat, snipe, bar-tailed godwit, cormorant, lapwing, fieldfare, oystercatcher, pochard, shelduck, black-headed gull, redwing, dunlin, sandpiper, yellowhammer, skylark, greenfinch, chaffinch, meadow pipit, turnstone, wigeon, and a real mixed bag of other birds spending November on around the marshes.
There are countless other species appearing on the North Norfolk coast according to the proper birders: black brant goose, Iceland gull, glaucous gull*, Lapland bunting, cattle egret*, great white egret*, Slavonian grebe, spotted redshanks*, water pipit, snow bunting*, Tundra bean goose*, great Northern diver*, long-tailed duck*, little stint*, velvet scoter*, hawfinch*, Caspian gull, goshawk, Richard’s pipit, shorelark, rough-legged buzzard, yellow-browed warbler, Sabine’s gull, grey phalarope, little auk, black-throated diver, red-necked grebe, Leach’s petrel, Pomarine skua, black guillemot, ring ouzel, twite, purple sandpiper*, scaup, white-fronted goose*, dotterel.
Now, that list is what sets us apart from the proper birders, not only would I not recognise nor spot the majority of those, I’ve not even heard of a half a dozen of them before.
*We have since seen the asterisked species in various places.
Following on from my earlier Australian bird of the year post (no Kylie nor Nicole jokes, purleez), here are a few grainy scans from the albums of Mr & Mr Sciencebase from Oct-Dec 1989.
Top to bottom: Pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus), comb-crested jacana (Irediparra gallinacea), Australian brush (or bush) turkey (Alectura lathami), sulfur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), Major Mitchell’s cockatoo (Lophochroa leadbeateri), azure kingfisher (Ceyx azureus), eastern great egret (Ardea alba modesta), Royal spoonbill (Platalea regia) alongside little egret, Eastern great egret (Ardea alba modesta) and gull.
