Wings on Wednesday + Spring is Just Round the Corner

Spotted this commercial airliner flying over the village a few days ago. It's the first time I have noticed one with the name of the airline painted underneath. (Small crop as it was a long way up)



To replace the Lavender bushes which had died in the front garden I ordered four Lavender Munstead which arrived Tuesday morning. These were soon planted out. If I am lucky they might flower a bit this year but should make a good show from next year and attract butterflies and bumble bees.. (top left photo below)



With the warmer weather recently there are several signs of the approaching Spring. The first of my miniature daffs are starting to flower (bottom left).  My narrow raised bed has some colour from the Pansies  plus bulbs are shooting from the eleven clumps I transferred some time ago (top right) Finally there are lots of seven spot ladybirds emerging to take advantage of the Sun's warmth.

While I was out in the garden on what turned out to be a pleasant sunny day I thought I would get round to clearing the dead leaves from under the Corkscrew Hazel bush.



As well as noticing that the catkins are now expanding there were dozens and dozens of Ladybirds emerging from the dead leaves under the bush. Seems like it was a good job I didn't get round to tidying up before the Winter. In fact I only cleared a small patch and left the rest of the leaves so the Ladybirds still have somewhere to hide during the colder nights. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Macro on Monday - Guess What + a Round Tuit Finished

Brilliant. A full house last week with Jan, Wilma, Keith and Adrian gaining my congratulations and the      for correctly identifying the ladybird / lady bug.




I wonder how people will get on with this week's mystery photo. This is the first time for many months that I have used stacked photos and had nearly forgotten how to do it. 14 stacked photos processed using CombineZP.
Guess What:



Got Round Tuit
Quite some time ago, while in Heath Robinson mode, I built a little gizmo for animating a 3D object. Yesterday I got round to finishing the project which consists of an Arduino programmable 'computer' driving a stepper motor. The object is turned 1/48th of a turn and a still photo taken, repeated 49 times. The resulting stills were reduced to 1/4 original size as a batch using IrfanView. Those were processed as a video file using PhotoLapse 3 and that video repeated 8 times in Corel Video Studio Pro X4 to make this final video file of a small pine cone:



The setup is shown below.
A Canon 350D with LED ring flash on the left, electronics gizmo on the right:

Crescent Moon + Coronal Mass Ejection

As last night Jupiter, Venus and the crescent Moon were bright in the sky. When I looked tonight they were no longer in line. Venus appears much nearer to the Moon in the sky:

Venus and the crescent Moon:


A bit more of the Moon was visible and I could still make out its full circular shape, which was difficult to capture with the camera: You can just make it out on the first photo.



Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)
I have just seen a report that a CME from the Sun will hit the Earth's magnetic field on Feb 26th at 13.30 UT +/- 7 hours. This could cause a G2 class magnetic storm with Auroras seen as far south as 55 degrees North.

The Sky at Night

Last night was an opportunity to see Jupiter, Venus and the crescent Moon shining brightly in a line just after Sunset. The first photo was taken with the Canon 350D fitted with an EFS 18-55mm lens set to 24mm. It was a longish exposure of 20 seconds at f3.5 and the Moon was over exposed to say the least, losing its crescent shape. The three bright objects running top left to bottom right are Jupiter, Venus and the Moon. The red streak below Venus is the lights from a commercial aircraft. What initially caught my eye was the Moon, though most was in shadow the full circle could be faintly made out.



This cropped photo of the Moon was taken with the Canon 50D fitted with an EF 100-400mm lens set to 400mm:  1/32 second at f5.6



I don't know why but photos seem to end up darker when they have been uploaded to Flickr.

Friday at the Flicks - Blue Tit + Rooks

It's not often I get a long clear view of a Blue Tit at the Birdy Bistro. More often than not they zoom in, grab a bite and zoom off again so I was really pleased to get this piece of video:



In the following sequence a Rook is helping itself to bread. It flies off to a nearby tree to eat. After a while a second Rook joins it and the first feeds some of the bread to the second and then changes places. This sharing of food is common with Rooks which are very social birds:



Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.


Word Verification Update
It looks as though the powers that be at Blogger HQ have taken some note of the outcry against the new word verification system. Last night I hit three bloggs still using it but on each the letters were clearer and with no sight of the negative block in the middle of one word. I managed all three first time.

Feed Your House Spider With Beef

If you want to keep your house spiders healthy in the Winter months when there are few flies about all you need is a bowl of boiled minced beef and a dog with a missing tooth who scatters bits of food around the floor.  ;>)

This is what happened a couple of days ago. An hour or so after Bobby had eaten some of his tea time meal I went in the kitchen. Once I had switched the lights on I noticed a large spider on the floor. Surprisingly it did not run away even when I bent down to have a close look. Nor did it move when I shone a torch right next to it. Why? It had found a small piece of Bobby's minced beef he had thoughtfully left on the floor. The spider was not going to lose its prize.

These four shots make up one picture which can be enlarged:


I went back several times, took several photos, some illuminated with flash, others with an LED torch. Even though the Lumix TZ7 was just a couple of inches away from the spider it stayed put obviously treating the tasty morsel of beef the same way it would its natural prey.

For anyone who wants to know how to have several photos on one image with a transparent background - this was a slight modification of the process shown HERE on YouTube which explains how to add multiple photos using Photoshop Elements.  Instead of overlapping the photos as shown in the video I first cropped each one, added a border and then resized each one on a transparent layer so they stayed separate.

Wings on Wednesday - Female Blackbird - First Year?

Spotted this bird at the Birdy Bistro. I would imagine it is a first year female Blackbird, looking at its general colouring which is paler that all the others which visit the garden and the prominent pale bar over the eyes which none of the others show. It is the correct size, if slightly slimmer than other females.