Triple Digit Weather...The Hard Way 8/10/2021

        Usually when the number 100 enters the conversation in a discussion of August weather, it is in terms of heat index or the actual stifling air temperature.  But on Tuesday evening when a line of thunderstorms crossing Lake Michigan reached the eastern shore it kicked up a 90.6 mph sustained (2 minute average) and a gust of 105.1 mph.  My 3-digit gust even got a mention on the online news site MLive

     My house survived unscathed but the winds took down a couple of my dead trees and up 5" diameter limbs off of some of the live ones.  It also mangled the middle section of the pole that supported my Purple Martin house and tossed the bird house and top 6-foot section of pole a little over 90 feet.

  The next morning I took the photo below, when I had to go to Ludington for a dentist appointment.

  The storm took out power to over half the customers of the company that supplies our electricity.  My power was out for 49 hours, but the standby generator was up to the task.

Freighter Floating on Air? 4/6/2020

    Early yesterday morning the lake freighter Roger Blough appeared to be floating above Lake Michigan as it passed by yard. I don't think it was a Fata Morgana, an optical illusion that usually results in a severely distorted image because it is an inverted image of an inverted image. I think my photo just depicts the ship surrounded in a haze that makes the water the same color of the background sky.

   Another nerdy thing seen from the yard the other day was the International Space Station having a favorable pass over west Michigan last Friday.  I was able to get a few photos with my 500mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter.

Venus and the Stars of Winter 3/1/2020

  Last night after a windy and overcast winter I took advantage of first clear moonless night of spring to get some parting shots of the winter stars as they sink lower in the west each evening.  In the photo above Sirius the Dog Star, is the bright one on the left, the constellation Orion is toward the middle to the upper left of the peak of my house and the orangish star to the upper right of the peak is Aldebaran the eye of Taurus the Bull. In a couple of weeks they will be lost in evening twilight not to been seen in a dark sky again until August or September when they'll rise before the morning dawn.

  You may have noticed the jet sneaking into the frame as a streak of light emerging from behind the house peak.  Jets weren't the only things interfering with my astrophotography attempts.  The photo below shows another jet and two satellites.

Jet on left, stable satellite in the middle and a tumbling satellite on the right

   The changing brightness from not visible to bright as Venus is indication the satellite that left the dashed line is tumbling out of control with a period of about 5 seconds. 

  In the photo above, the light paths were cropped  (and in the case of the tumbler, rotated for composition purposes) to show the differences in the light trails they leave.

    Venus was bright enough to cast a shadow and did a admirable job lighting up the lake during the 30 second photo below.

What ISS it? 3/4/2017

   At first (through maybe ten) glance(s) the above photo appears to be an empty or extremely underexposed black field.  It is neither.
   Here is the technical data of the image....
                                                Time/Date.........0643 AM/March 4, 2017.
                                                Exposure..........1/1250 sec @ f/16 at ISO 2500
                                                Focal Length ..700mm (500mm x 1.4x teleconverter)
                                                Camera.............Canon 5d Mark IV

  This version of the photo highlights the location of the subject.

   A closer crop reveals there actually is something in the photo. But what? A planet?

    No.  A tighter crop shows the subject has an irregular shape to it.

   A plane?

  Nope, it's the International Space Station.  The 356' wide object was 264 miles from my driveway when I took the handheld photo.  I'm somewhat pleased with the result that I was able to obtain with  my manually-focused lens at an effective 700mm focal length (500mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter).

   Things closer to my house than the ISS was when I took this photo....
                           Wrigley Field Chicago, IL.............153 miles
                           Ford Field Detroit, MI...................204 miles
                           Fort Wayne, IN..............................209 miles
                           Crane Creek SP, OH......................231 miles
                           Dubuque, IA..................................236 miles
                           Point Pelee NP Ontario.................243 miles
                           Copper Harbor, MI........................251 miles
                           Winona, MN..................................260 miles

Flight Radar

  Ever see a high altitude jet fly over and wonder where it started or where it is going.  Flightradar24.com  can give you those answers.  The other day I photographed this red-bellied Airbus 330 that flew over my house.  I had my computer handy and found that it took off from Chicago's O'Hare and was heading to Berlin.

A few minutes later an O'Hare to London Heathrow flight was ID'd by Flightradar24.com,

Queen Ant Day 9/18/2015

  Every year ant colonies in an instinctual effort to pass on their genes, raise extra queens and drones(male ants) that set out to start their own colonies.  Typically in late summer all the colonies in a particular area will release the queens on the same day.  The day of flying ants, deemed 'Queen Ant Day' by my brother Rob when we were kids, is not so much dependent strictly on the calendar, weather conditions also play a big part .   

   Yesterday afternoon I noticed a Common Nighthawk working the sky over my house.  When I put the binoculars on it I noticed several flying ants in the field of view.  A quick check of the ant colonies by my driveway, revealed the Queen Ant Day festivities were in full swing.  Below are photos of the event. 

Activity around the nest

Drones and workers

Queen and drones

  Here is an attempt at video.

Venus gets photobombed 12/28/2013

 This morning I stayed over an hour into dayshift.  During the hour working with my buddy Sean, who recently bought a telescope, the conversation turned to planets currently visible.  I mentioned to him that Venus is now a large crescent as it is heading to a January 11th  alignment with the Sun.
    This afternoon I awoke to a beautiful late-December clear sky with a temperature in the mid-40's, a perfect opportunity to try to find Venus during the day.  I found it almost immediately with binoculars but with the smaller field of view of my telescope the low-contrast sky made for a frustrating hour-long search before I finally found it. Once it was located I removed the telescope eyepiece and hooked up my camera, refocused and fired off 4 photos.  When I reviewed the photos, I was shocked to see that Delta Airlines photobombed my Venus portrait by flying a DC-9 through my field of view.  

  Four photos and I was done. I wasn't going to top that.  The funny thing is, is that I never saw the plane even after I noticed I had captured a photo of it.   Although the jet looks like it is low, consider that this was taken through a scope of 2000mm focal length, so the planes angular size is only 9 minutes of arc, less than 1/3 of the 30 minutes of arc that the moon appears.  
  Here is the calculation of the distance to the jet.  9 arc minutes =0.15 degrees.  Sine of 0.15 degrees = 0.00261799.  The length of a DC-9 fuselage is 104.4 ft.  The length of the fuselage divided by the distance to the plane=sine of 0.15.
   So 104.4 ft divided by 0.00261799 (the sine of the angle) = 39877 ft
  Among certain circles there are rumors that I heavily photoshop my photos.  Here is the original photo. You can judge the degree of photoshopping.

Breaking News Spaceweather.com put my photo on their front page here is the link.
http://www.spaceweather.com/

Here is a screengrab of their home page from December 28, 2013.  So if you click on the link above after my photo has been replaced you can check their archives by entering the date above in the archive search in their right hand column.