View allAll Photos Tagged Filaments
Filaments - Capturing high quality portraits of wildlife is something that I really enjoy. Even though Red-tailed Hawks are common, so common in fact, they are often overlooked as subjects, they can be difficult to photograph up close.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to photograph a juvenile bird recently. I was able to capture this closeup showcasing the beauty of the feather filaments, beak, and eye. The Nikon D850 really shines for wildlife portraiture - with both zoom lenses and prime lenses. I've also been loving DxO PureRaw - it really renders my RAW files so much cleaner and does a much more natural job cleaning up noise than Topaz Denoise (also a great program, but applies default sharpening even at a setting of 0, which causes artifacts).
View large for feather detail.
Species: Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis)
Location: Santa Clara County, CA, USA
Equipment: Nikon D850 + Nikkor 200-500mm f5.6 ED VR, Handheld
Settings: 1/160s, ISO: 360, f/5.6 @500mm, +0.3 EV
The filaments are outside our double-paned kitchen window, which had been cleaned inside, but not outside. At the moment that I snapped this, the wind was causing the filaments to dance wildly. I was surprised that the image actually had any defined lines.
“This World” by Mary Oliver
I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.
Finally, after weeks of cloud I managed to catch a quick glimpse of the Sun.
The filament is around 300,000 km long.
Lunt LS152Tha/B34/DSII at 80mm and Grasshopper 3 camera.
Not sure I ever shared this one, but a nice bolt of lightning from a dying supercell south of Lamar, Colorado back on June 6th, 2017 with some tour guests!
Proms, plage, and filaments make it rather interesting today.
I pulled an all nighter last night with my other scope, so I decided to swap it out for the SolarMax when the sun popped up above the horizon this morning. The seeing wasn't the best by then, though. And I don't usually shoot when the sun is low on the horizon. Whatever the reason, I had a problem getting a nice uniform disk. Still, the disk sort of looks interesting so I decided to upload the shot anyway.
Looks like someone has been scrawling graffiti all over the surface.
UPDATE: According to Spaceweather.com, the large sunspot (AR2859) you see there in the upper left quadrant erupted on August 26th ... the day I took this shot ... to produce a C3-Class flare and that flare caused a massive "solar tsunami". As a result a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) will impact the earth during the late hours of August 29th. Read about it here: www.spaceweather.com/
February 14, 2026
Image by Phil Whitebloom
This Hα (Hydrogen Alpha) image highlights a single magnetic structure as it transitions from a filament on the solar disk into a prominence rising beyond the Sun’s limb. What appears as a dark, elongated filament against the bright chromosphere curves upward as it approaches the edge of the Sun, then becomes luminous once it extends into space.
The change in appearance is purely a matter of perspective. On the disk, the cooler, denser plasma absorbs background light and appears dark. Off the limb, the same plasma glows brightly against the darkness of space, revealing the three-dimensional geometry of the magnetic field lines that support it.
The gentle curvature visible in this image traces the arc of the Sun’s magnetic structure, making the spatial relationship clear. Rather than an abrupt boundary at the limb, the filament smoothly lifts and rotates into view, emphasizing that filaments and prominences are not separate phenomena, but different views of the same magnetic feature.
This image offers a direct visual demonstration of how the Sun’s magnetic field shapes and suspends plasma above the surface, transforming what appears to be a flat, linear feature into a towering structure extending tens of thousands of miles into space.
Capture & Processing Details
Telescope: 60 mm Lunt Hydrogen Alpha solar telescope, double-stack configuration
Optics: 2× Barlow lens
Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro
Capture Software: SharpCap 4.1
Date & Time: February 14, 2026, 18:33 UTC
Location: Laurel, Maryland, USA
Exposure: 122.6 ms
Gain: 256
Frames Used: Best 25% by quality
Format: TIFF, MONO8
Processing Notes
Frames were stacked using AutoStakkert with quality-based selection. Final tonal and structural adjustments were completed in Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop, with care taken to preserve the natural brightness transition between disk and limb while maintaining fine chromospheric detail.
I had to fix my microscope lamp.
I took a macro of the lamp filament for this week's submission.
I used my Nikon, F mount with a T mount adapter, T mount adapter to Microscope eyepiece adapter, and slipped it into the eyepiece of my B&L Stereo Scope. No "camera" lens used.
I then used low voltage to heat the filament to produce the "radiant" glow. The two electrodes (white solder connections) are about 1/4" apart.
Sometimes the photo finds YOU!!
Something I have wanted to do for ages. But I can pick umpteen holes in this. Trying to even get the right sort of bulb was not the easiest - most are LED or not dimmable. Then the bulb would have worked better rotated 180 degrees. Getting rid of dust was another nightmare. So don't look closely ..Lol! So I think I will have another try at this sometime in future.
I have always felt that clouds would represent softness. This montage includes this mornings sunrise (2 photos) plus the spun filiament arrangement of a flower I found recently.
“Do not be hardened by the pain
and cruelty of this world.
Be strong enough to be gentle,
to be soft and supple like running water,
gracefully bending around sudden turns,
lithely waving in strong winds,
freely flowing over sharp rocks,
all the while quietly sculpting
this hard world into ever deeper beauty," L.R. Knost
Old light bulb I came across at the streetcar museum.
RX100M3 25mm | f3.2 | 1/125 sec | ISO 125
Processed with VSCO Kodak Ectar 25
A Macro Mondays submission in the topic "contained". This glowing filament of a small incandescent light bulb is contained within its glass enclosure.