Fire Ant Flickers (#14)

Howdy, y’all. Today is National Indian Pudding Day, and I got nothing.

However, it is also the first day in 232 years in which the U.S. Mint will no longer strike pennies for general commerce. Yesterday, the Mint created an “artisanal batch” (as the Wall Street Journal described it) of five pennies which bear a special mark (see my clever graphic below) — an omega symbol over Lincoln’s shoulder (I have no idea why they would choose the symbol for oxygen-18, but then I’m continually confused by governmental decisions) — to distinguish them from the run-of-the-mill coins that are worth only 1/100th of a dollar. Those five are to be auctioned off at some point to swell the coffers of the U.S. government. I hope they make it a silent auction with online bidding open to the public so we all can participate.

I mentioned above that pennies would no longer be minted for “general commerce”; I understand that the Mint will still issue special pennies for collectors, sort of like how the Postal Service issues specialty stamps.

Moving right along…

The Kids Are Alright…

[Extra credit if you can identify the source for the preceding heading]

Alert Gazette readers will recall that I recently stumbled across the musical prowess of Vulfpeck. I suspect that approximately 78.7% of you already knew about them but I’ve always had a soft spot for the musical minority, of which I’m a proud member. So it is with great gusto that I present another discovery, this time of a band that makes me great optimistic that our musical future is in good hands. I’m referring, of course, to Rumpus Machine (you’ll be more forgiving of the name once you see who came up with it).

I first heard/saw a performance via a Facebook video and I was immediately hooked. The band is comprised of four teens — brothers and sisters — from Auckland, New Zealand (shoutout to you Kiwis in the audience), and they seem to have the proper respect for Real Music, i.e. classic rock-and-roll. Take a listen, via YouTube:

OK, so maybe a 13-year-old girl playing bass on ZZ Top’s LaGrange could be considered a bit creepy, but give them props for a proper treatment of the song. And their parents obviously are raising them right, because how else would they come up with a 7-minute version of L.A. Woman by the Doors, or a worthy rendering of Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock?

The stars are not aligned…

Last night was the final opportunity to view the Northern Lights here in Central Texas, at least for a while. I had good intentions of taking a shot at photographing them. I did my usual in-depth research — I looked at the top three links returned by a single Google search — to learn the proper camera settings (and then spent a not insignficant amount of time figuring out how to actually input them to my DSLR). I mounted my camera to my new tripod, attached a wired remote shutter release, noted which way north is, and plotted my strategy. There was only one unavoidable and regrettable problem. OK, maybe two.

The best time for viewing them here started at 10:00 p.m. but the optimal time was around midnight. Those of you who know me also know that…well, that was probably an insurmountable obstacle. Also, while I knew which way north was, I also knew that the northern horizon was almost completely blocked by those darned trees and pesky leaves and immovable hills.

I took the rig onto our back deck around 9:30 or so and could detect not even the faintest of colors in the northern sky. But the heavens were laden with stars — it was a gorgeous, cloudless night — and I hated to waste my preparations. So I took some pictures of the stars. I was literally amazed at what I saw when plugged in the SD card from the camera and looked at the images on my desktop computer.

I realize this photo is fairly unimpressive, but here’s the deal: I could see only about 10% of those stars with my naked eye. The 15-second shutter speed and light-gathering capability of the camera brought so many more of them into view. If you look at this photo on your desktop or laptop, right-click on it to open a 4x enlargement of the image and you’ll get a better view of the varying sizes and colors of the stars.

Another interesting (to me) phenomenon was that some photos of the sky in other directions were a little blurred, as if the stars were in motion. Well, of course they weren’t, but the earth was, and even just 15 seconds was enough to introduce a tiny bit of motion blur. The reason for the difference in amount of blur is that the non-blurred stars were in the northern sky while the blurry ones were in the southern sky. In the northern hemisphere (where I am), the stars to the south appear to move faster because of the increased angular velocity of the Earth’s rotation the closer to the equator you get. (Was that even close to correct from a grammar perspective?)

Here is a very helpful article that explains how shutter speed affects motion blur in astrophotography, and the compromises involved in deciding what settings to employ. Of course, if one were really serious about photographing the night sky, one would invest in a “tracking head” that allows one’s camera to automatically follow the course of the stars. Frankly, I’m not $500 worth of serious, plus it would mean I would have to stay up past 9:30 p.m.

Here Comes the Sun…

[There’s no extra credit if you can identify the source for the preceding heading, but you can feel good about yourself anyway.]

So, last night’s photographic session yielded a mixed bag, but how about this morning’s sunrise?

There was an interesting layering of clouds this morning around sunrise and I was able to launch my drone from the back yard and get a few photos of the sun peeking between horizon and cloud cover. This view was from an altitude of just under 400′, the maximum permitted by my license.

Because of our location (trees and hills again), we don’t have easy access to sunsets, but the sunrises can be equally glorious.

Closing shot #1

Closing shot #2