Harrowing Time

Yesterday I decided we would have a look at the field which was being combined a short while ago. I had expected to see it ploughed so was quite surprised to see that the straw had all been removed but the stubble was still showing:



A closer look saw there was activity on the far side of the field.
A disc harrow with a hazy view of the Lincolnshire Wolds in the background:







Notice the road wheels above the harrow. Once the whole thing is rotated 180 degrees they enable it to be driven on roads without damaging the surface. Also the discs can usually be raised to a vertical position to take up less width on our narrow country lanes.


A short bit of iffy video hand held in one hand at full zoom:



A bit of nonsense playing with a cinemagraph type program.
Resolution is poor as the program doesn't save unless I pay about £100 so I took a GIF screen grab. If in b/w it would look like something from a silent comedy movie.



I don't remember seeing harrowing before ploughing, assuming it will be ploughed soon.

Starlight Board Camera

I decided to invest in a low light board video camera to see how much it could see at night;

 


It works on 12V and has a 1/2 inch CMOS sensor producing 800TVL (TV lines) and comes with two 3.5mm wide angle lenses. One with IR filter and one without. I used the one without and a small amount of digital zoom. Stated sensitivity is 0.00008 LUX. Size is near 1.5 inch (38mm) square.

Fading daylight:


Twilight:


For comparison this is what the Nikon could see about the same time:


Set it up looking through the kitchen window. Connected to the MacBook via a EzCap video capture device and saved some video every so often. With such a wide angle lens the bats look very small but the camera saw more activity than I did with the naked eye. Easier to see them with the video at full screen. As can be seen by the final clip it gets very noisy when the light level get too low.



I may be able to improve things. The camera comes with another board which has five push buttons. Once plugged in the main board it gives access to a menu to control video gain, contrast, etc..  There are various ghostly apparitions reflected in the window - me and an automatic light which detects movement in the kitchen.

Tuesday Was A Complete Washout

Yesterday it rained, and it rained, and it ........  Never really heavy, sometimes so fine it couldn't be seen but still soaked clothes in a short time. (Time scale on the graphs is from midnight to midnight):



The people who have installed solar panels around the village won't have been getting a great deal of use from them either. A Sunny day will give around 1000 watts per square metre:



Still overcast this morning but hopefully we will get back to blue skies later in the day.

Two Way Clouds - Timelapse Video

Monday morning started with some interesting cirrus cloud formations:



Later on I set the Toshiba on my sturdy tripod in the back garden:



A bit of overkill with such a tiny camera on that tripod!

As before I set the Toshiba to take one picture every 5 seconds until the battery ran flat. This time it took 1126 photos which were downloaded to the MacBook, processed as a video in the free Mac app Zeitraffer and then cropped and title added in iMovie.

Cirrus moving northwards and Cumulus moving southwards:



I always find it fascinating the way the winds at different levels can blow in different directions. That can be seen clearly in this video. There is some flicker as the exposure is automatic and can change from photo to photo.

Soundtrack is royalty free music 'Slow Dissolve' from Purple Planet.

The Met Office have a useful pdf file for identifying cloud types HERE.

Monday Mystery - Guess What

Congratulations and the virtual Midmarsh Gold Star go to Adrian for recognising the bird seed feeder from last week:

   

Maybe this week's close view of an everyday object will be easier to recognise.
Guess What:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Monday.
No prizes, just for fun and maybe a virtual Midmarsh Gold or Silver Star.

X-Sports Timelapse Clouds

It's ages since I last used the Toshiba Camileo X-Sports camera so I though it was time to blow the cobwebs off it and grab a bit more timelapse. I wanted to see how long a battery would last. I made sure one was fully charged. The camera was set to take a shot every five seconds and placed on a mini tripod in my bedroom window. Bits of the window frame and building show as the Toshiba has a very wide angle lens.



The disadvantage of shooting through glass is reflections which show on the brighter sections but as I knew I would be out for part of the time it was running I didn't want to set it up outdoors.

The battery lasted about 1.5 hours with those settings. In that time it took 989 photos.
The camera saves each main photo but also a thumbnail for each one. I found this a problem last time as I only wanted the full size ones for processing as a video. How to get rid of the thumbnails? It was a while before it dawned on me to sort them according to size. Then it was easy to see which were the small files and delete them.

The stills were processed as a video using the free Mac app Zeitraffer (German for timelapse). It just makes either an mp4 or mov video. That was then processed in iMovie to crop to 16:9 and tweak exposure as the originals were too dark.

Itsy Bitsy Spiders

This one, about 10mm total size, was spotted on the side of a water butt as I filled my watering can. Four focus stacked photos:



The next was on a plant at the edge of the garden pond busily wrapping up its supper. A bit smaller than the other one. As it was constantly moving these are individual shots.

In the first shot you can see the silk from its spinnerets and the way the web is being twisted as it rotates its meal, especially if you enlarge the photo:





Who are you looking at?

Itsy-Bitsy Spider

The itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the water spout
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain
And the itsy-bitsy spider
Climbed up the spout again