35.8104 years in science communication
News and views about photography, cameras, social media, as well as pointers to Dave Bradley’s photographic output. You can also find me on Imaging Storm, Instagram and Flickr as “sciencebase”
A couple of days ago I spent an hour or so in our chilly garden attempting to get freezing shots of soap bubbles. This afternoon, I took inspiration from a feature in Practical Photography magazine, stayed warm indoors and took some snapshots of oil floating on water.
I have just spent an hour or so, much to the amusement of Mrs_Sciencebase blowing soap bubbles and crawling around on the frost-covered lawn in the back garden with a camera loaded with a macro lens. The bubbles were made with washing up liquid and water and a couple of drops of glycerine (suggested by Mrs “Sb”) to make them persist longer once formed.
We couldn’t find a proper bubble blower so a plastic spanner for some long-forgotten nut was substituted. There’s an art to blowing bubbles. You have to know how much soap solution to load into the bubbler, you have to know how hard to blow, at what angle to project your breath, and so much more. I got a few to form but most popped (silently) before they found a perch on the frozen lawn.
One or two landed only to pop, again completely silently, once I’d got the camera in place to snap them. Intriguingly, a couple of them had already started to freeze and rather than popping seemed to sag and deflate leaving a gelatinous husk on the hoary blades of grass.
After spending a good hour freezing in the garden, it occurred to me that I could’ve done the job indoors any time of year and simply used the food freezer. But, I’d persevered in the cold and was desperate to get at least one photo of a frozen bubble however transient the soapy sphere might be. And, in the end, I did, can’t say I’m lathered with the effort but then its absolutely cold out there.
That blurry smudge in the middle of my photo? I think…I think…that’s the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s the most distant object humans can see with their unaided eyes. Here, we’re aided, zoomed in quite a lot. There’s blur due to camera shake, unfortunately, or is an 8-second exposure too much to not get star trails with a 150 mm zoom…
If it’s not Andromeda I’d like to know what it actually is as it was definitely a barely visible smudge in the sky away from the big “arrowhead” of Cassiopeia and in a line from Mirach and Mu Andromedae in the constellation of Pegasus.
ISO 3200
f/6.7
t 8 seconds
150mm focal length
I totally forgot that I’d had another got a photographing the International Space Station, ISS, as it flew overhead a few nights ago. The photos were not very good, so I headed outside to try and catch this evening’s very bright, overhead flypast and was a little more successful.
If it’s flying over where you live and it’s night time and the sky is clear, look to the western horizon for a steady, bright light that travels across the sky heading East, it will take several minutes to cross the sky, it moves quite quickly so hard to get a focus lock on with a big lens. There’s no twinkling, no flashing lights, just a very bright steady and steadfast light.
This was the best of a large sequence of photos I snapped where you can definitely see the shape of the beast and how it is rotating as it travels across the sky. Full-frame SLR with a 600mm zoom lens, EV turned down a few notches, ISO as low as I could go and get an exposure. f/5.6 but that’s irrelevant and a short shutterspeed to preclude shake while handholding the machine.
This is a 48×48 pixel crop from my original 5472×3648 photograph scaled up 4x and coupled with a NASA photo of the ISS so you can see better what it is you’re actually looking at here!
Below is a 768 pixelwidth crop of the original. The white speck in the middle is what I’ve cropped to in the view above
It’s an old photographic trick, set a relatively long exposure time and move the camera while pressing the shutter and after, you get blur. But, if you’ve got focus on the subject you might just get some nice abstracts. Here are a few efforts in a local woodland (Fen Reeves Community Wood). Most of the photos were down swinging the camera vertically either up or down. The second-last one below, above the orange and brown Autumn Leaves, one is a horizontal swing.
A trip to the Greek capital Athens and the island of Kythira yielded some good times, lovely views, lots of laughs with new(ish) friends, and sightings of quite a few species of bird, invertebrates and plantlife we’d not all “ticked” before. Here are a few snaps of the various species:
Western Marsh Harrier, Circus aeruginosus
Birds
Alpine Swift
Barn Swallow
Bee Eater
Black Stork
Blackbird
Blackcap
Blue Rock Thrush
Blue tit
Booted Eagle
Cetti’s Warbler
Collared Dove
Common Buzzard
Common sparrowhawk
Eleanora’s Falcon
Great tit
Grey Wagtail
Hobby
Honey buzzard
Kestrel
Kingfisher
Lesser Kestrel
Levant sparrowhawk
Marsh Harrier
Peregrine
Raven
Red-rumped Swallow
Redstart
Robin
Sardinian Warbler
Scops owl
Spotted Flycatcher
Swift
Willow Warbler
Yellow-legged Gull
Butterflies
African Monarch
Blue-winged grasshopper
Cleopatra
Clouded Yellow
Dark Bush Cricket
European Swallowtail
Grayling
Large Tortoiseshell
Long-tailed Blue
Mediterranean Speckled Wood
Painted Lady
Red Admiral
Scarce Swallowtail
Skipper (European?)
Southern Meadow Brown
Two-tailed Pasha
Other invertebrates
Ants
Cicada
Common Plume
Scoliid Wasp, Scolia hirta
Dragonflies
Egyptian Grasshopper
Hummingbird Hawk-moth
Oriental Hornet
Praying Mantis
Red-winged grasshopper
Silver Y moth
Small Dusty Wave moth
Southern Skimmer
Striped Shieldbug
Turnip Moth
Violet Carpenter Bee
Plants
Almond-leafed wild pear
Carob
Cypress, funereal, male and female
Fig
Giant fennel
Giant Reed
Juniper
Kephalonian pine
Kermes Oak
Large Mediterranean Spurge
Lemon
Lime
Maiden hair spleen wort
Maritime pine
Mastika
Mulberry
Mullein
Norfolk island pine
Oleander
Olive
Oriental plane
Pomegranate
Portuguese laurel
Prickly Pear
Rock samphire
Sea daffodil
Sea holly
Sea squill
Sharp-leaved rush
Smilax
Spiny asparagus
Strawberry tree
Tamarisk
Tree heather
Umbrella pine
Vertebrates
Brown Rat (deceased)
Cat
Cattle
Dog
Fish
Goat
Lizards (No ID: brown/green, large/small)
Sheep
Scat
Goat
Sheep
Stone Martin
You can’t miss the tallest peak in Athens, no not the one with The Parthenon at the top (68 metres elevation), but Mount Lycabettus, also known as Lycabettos, Lykabettos or Lykavittos. In Greek, it’s pronounced “likavi’tos”, so the first three syllables flow as a triplet and the emphasis is on the final beat. It stands at 264 metres.
Second full day on our trip to Athens, we took the funicular railway to the top to see the 19th Century St George’s Chapel and take in the views over the city. I’d have chosen to climb to the top, despite the heat, if I’d realised it was in a tunnel. But, we did walk down and then circumnavigate the pine woodland the begins about half way down and stretches to the base.
One of the things I found intriguing about the name of this hill is the “lika/lyco” prefix, that I thought must refer to wolves in some way, but a couple of Athenians I asked didn’t seem to think so. On Wikipedia, there’s a suggestion that it had an ancient name Lucabetu meaning a mastoid hill, but Wiki also says that the modern name means “walked by wolves”.
Could the original name of this hill be the etymology of the Greek word for wolf, lykos, because that’s where the early Athenians most frequently encountered them? In a similar context, the word lyceum, is definitely connected to the Greek word for wolf, alluding to wolfishness, but referring to a garden of the god Apollo who was said to be wolfish in Greek mythology…
Near-expert friend, Penelope Wilson, tells me she can corroborate, or perhaps, rather complicate! For Lycabettus, apart from the mastoid suggestion others have proposed something to do with luke (light), obviously also associated with Apollo. But, the Ancient Greeks were very good at holding more than one meaning in their heads at a time, and there are puns on Apollo Lukeios as meaning (born from/slayer of) wolves and as god of light. Anyway, she tells me, wolves are definitely there, etymology is attested from classical times. The hill itself was only named or identified with ancient Lycabettus in the 19th C it was previously known as Hill of St George or Mount Aghesmos.
That latter point suggests that the etymology is of the hill’s name not of the word wolf, in that case, but wolfishness is definitely part of the play. It’s still more complicated as Dr Wilson expands via a link to the page for the Lycabettus Run.
