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Red-winged Blackbird male
(I'm finally looking at memory cards I've accumulated since last spring ;o)
Kibbutz Ginosar
Tiberias
Galilee Sea
Israel
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Female Purple Finch - Penny Lane, Penny Lake Preserve, Boothbay Harbor, Maine
Partially cloudy skies, make for nice bright diffused light when the sun shines through the fringes of clouds.
Model:
Eugenia Spring Forward
Fashion credits:
dress: ITBE Integrity Toys
jacket: Ayumi Power House
shoes: FR2 shoes pack
Forward - Our Daily Challenge
All rights reserved. Please do not use or reproduce this image on websites, blogs or any other media without my permission.
As 2016 slips silently into the past I'll look forward to the coming year and hope that it treats every kindly!! Thanks again for all of your support and the many wonderful comments!! 2017 will come in like a lion for us!! We live in an unincorporated area and the neighbors will be intent once again on blowing up our usually quiet neighborhood with fireworks!! I don't mind them so much when they are still exploding at 3 am it gets to be a bit much!!
We'll lead off the New Year with one of my little green buddies!! I realize there's not a lot of green showing in this shot but it really is tough to capture those greens when he's standing on top of you and threatening to take you camera unless you give him a fish!! Luckily for me he bit on the snack bar and the bottle of Gatorade! A very friendly guy here and not the least bit intimidated by my presence!! Photo taken on Horsepen Bayou!
DSL_9867uls
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. Walt Disney
I haven't been able to go out with my camera lately due to a sick cat I've been nursing, so I've been going through old memory cards finding things that I didn't process before.
Comet 46P/Wirtanen...I've been looking forward to imaging this comet since I heard that it was on its way to our part of the Solar System. The last time I imaged a comet was 18 months ago and I had forgotten how tricky they can be to image and process. Comets move pretty quickly so long exposures are not usually an option. This comet is moving at 5 arcseconds a minute so we were limited to 60 second exposures to avoid it streaking. Processing is a challenge too as either the stars or the comet will be streaky when the images are stacked - unless you process everything twice and combine the results as I've done here. The only software I have that does this automatically is Deep Sky Stacker (DSS) which I'm not a fan of but it's very useful for comet processing. The combined image still had some faint streaks but they were easy enough to remove. The image also needed a big boost in saturation to bring out the colour. All in all I'm pleased with the result (though I would have liked to have resolved the tail). At the moment the 46P/Wirtanen is still low in in the sky close to the southern horizon so we had to shoot into the murky London light pollution. It would have been better to wait until it's higher in the sky (it reaches perihelion on December 16th and should be significantly brighter) but with the weather here being what it is you never know if there'll be another opportunity. This session was also a test to see how the newly cleaned mirrors performed...pretty good but the collimation was slightly off making the stars appear less round (we adjusted the collimation after the comet disappeared behind trees). I hope there will be another chance to image this object later in the month.
Further information:
www.cometwatch.co.uk/comet-46p-wirtanen/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46P/Wirtanen
Comet 46P/Wirtanen is a short-period comet with an orbital period of 5.4 years. The comet is relatively small in size with an estimated diameter of just 1.2 kilometers. The object was the original target for ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft but the launch window was missed so 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko was Rosetta’s target in the end. The next perihelion passage of comet Wirtanen will be on 16 December 2018 when it will pass 0.078 AU (7,220,000 mi) from Earth. The icy space rock is expected to reach magnitude 3 (making it visible to the naked eye. This is the brightest prediction of known and future passes of this comet.
062 x 60 second exposures at Gain 180 cooled to -20°C
065 x dark frames
060 x flat frames
100 x bias frames
Binning 1x1
Total integration time = 1 hours and 2 minutes
Captured with APT
Guided with PHD2
Processed in Nebulosity, Fitsworks, Deep Sky Stacker and Photoshop
Equipment
Telescope: Sky-Watcher Explorer-150PDS
Mount: Skywatcher EQ5
Guide Scope: Orion 50mm Mini
Guiding Camera: ZWO ASI120MC
Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI1600MC Pro
Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector
Light pollution filter
This is a small part of a pod of pelicans that swooped down out of the sky and very cooperatively splashed down right in front of me, and then quickly arranged themselves in tight marching formation and swam past me like soldiers passing in review. So, I marched them through Topaz Impressions to make them presentable for Sliders Sunday.