Monday Montage

Last week's WidsMob Montage picture was



Fully identified as a photo of



a Horse chestnut seed, a conker
by Adrian and Ragged Robin with Wilma getting close.


For this week have a look at



If you know what it is, or just want to have a guess, please leave your answer in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the original photo, next Monday.

The Impressionist In Me

I wonder how I managed to produce those.
Can you guess?

Looking Up

Once the stormy weather had passed through on Wednesday and some semblance of calm had returned it was the chance to take a photo I've been trying to get for over a week but it has been so overcast. There were some bands of cloud but they were drifting past fairly rapidly leaving occasional clear spots.

To start with, a photo of the Moon



What I really wanted to capture was this



Recently the Moon and Mars have been visible quite close to each other in the night sky.
For over a week Mars has shone like a bright orange star. To spot it on the photo - start from the bright blurry moon and follow an imaginary line from it to the bottom left hand corner. Mars is about two thirds of the way towards that corner. It may show better if you click on the picture to see it larger.

Also noticeable was the amount of colour in the clouds.

 

Possibly ice crystals high in the atmosphere scattering the Moonlight. Some people have seen Moondogs, rainbow like streaks similar to Sundogs. See an example on the Spaceweather site HERE.

A Tale of Two Coppers

I recently had to replace my whistling kettle. My old polka dot one had a whistle which, when boiling, rapidly increased in pitch until it was beyond my hearing. Unfortunately a few days ago I nodded off and didn't hear it. When I finally woke it was to the smell of singed metal. It had boiled dry and was well and truly blackened in the process. This is my nice, shiny, copper coloured replacement:



This one has a loud, strident whistle which I can hear.
I used to have an electric one which whistled as it switched itself off. Unfortunately the element gave up. When I replaced it the new one tainted the water with a strong 'plastic' taste, even after several boilings, so I went back to the type I could use on a gas ring.

The second copper of the week - a Small Copper Butterfly.





Since the very cold blast we suffered earlier in the year I haven't seen many butterflies, let alone those which stayed still long enough to photograph.

Wordless Wednesday

A splash of Autumn

A Darker Sky

Over the past few months our local authorities have been changing the orange sodium street lights to warm white LEDs to save on running costs. Of course any savings will really only start once the cost of new lamps and their installation has been recovered.

In my immediate area some lamps are maintained by Lincolnshire County Council.  The remainder by East Lindsey District Council. How long they stay on at night depends on who owns them and where they are. Along my lane they are owned by ELDC and stay on all night. In the small estate immediately behind me they are owned by LCC and switch off about midnight. Another money saving venture.

 

Those along the main street belong to LCC. As far as I can tell they operate all night.

One advantage of this change is due to the design of the lamp housing and LEDs. They concentrate the light downwards with little, if any, escaping upwards. When I looked out of my kitchen window at night there used to be an orange glow in the sky from light spillage. Now the sky looks dark, especially after midnight.

 

Estate lamp at the top, main street lamp at the bottom.

These changes coincided with an interesting, to me, edition of The Sky at Night broadcast last Saturday. (I still miss Patrick Moore and rarely watch the latest presenters) This programme was about spotting and monitoring meteors and asteroids. Of interest to me was a short section about automatic photo and video recording 'shooting stars'. Something I have long wanted to have a go at but not bothered about with the amount of local light pollution. Now it may well be worth a coat of looking at. Mentioned in the programme was the UK group UKMON. Their website seems a good starting point for information on this subject.

A well waterproofed housing looks the first problem as most are designed to be angled below the horizontal. They may not be so efficiently water proofed when angled upwards. Seems like a job for the hot melt glue gun. Then it will need some 12V heating to clear any condensation which forms on cold nights.

I have an old but reasonable quality b/w video camera.

 

The main problem will be how to divide any recorded video into easily viewed sections. I don't fancy scanning through single nightly files with several hours continuous recording attempting to spot a possible 2 second streak of light. I have a spare DVR (digital video recorder) which can record moving objects by detecting changes in contrast in any part of the image.  Not sure its detecting ability is good enough or fast enough to spot a shooting star though. Plenty to research and experiment with as the dark nights lengthen.

Monday Montage

Last week's WidsMob Montage modified photo was



Correctly identified as



a wheelie bin / dustbin by Adrian, Wilma, Ragged Robin and The Weaver of Grass

Now for this week's montage



If you know what it is or would like to have a guess then please leave your answer in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the original photo, next Monday.