Sunday 30 December 2018

2018 in Pictures

I didn't think I'd be able to top the previous year, but 2018 served up a bumper crop of sightings (September in particular had enough highlights to fill a best-of list all by itself). But here for your viewing pleasure, after much vacillating, are the pick of the bunch:

January
There's nothing like a Waxwing to brighten up a dull winter's day:

Waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus)

February
I've got to include at least one Kestrel (it's the Law) and this bird was a bit special:

Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus)

March
Why go to the trouble of catching your own frog when you can steal one from a Marsh Harrier?

Buzzard vs Marsh Harrier

April
The light wasn't great that morning, but it's not every day that a Cuckoo pops up right in front of you:

Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus)

May
Here's something else you don't see every day, a Mole out in the open:

Mole (Talpa europaea)

...though it really wasn't the best day for small furry things to come out of hiding.

Also at Stodmarsh, a Hobby grabs an in-flight snack:

Hobby (Falco subbuteo)

June
At Foreness Housemartins collect mud for their nests:

House Martins (Delichon urbicum) 

And a Stoat pops up at Stodmarsh:

Stoat (Mustela erminea)

July
A typically quiet month for birds, but not for dragonflies such as this Norfolk Hawker:

Norfolk Hawker (Aeshna isoceles) 

August
Last ones to arrive; first ones to leave. A Swift prepares for its autumn migration at North Foreland:

Swift (Apus apus)

September
1st September at Grove Ferry was one of those rare and remarkable days where everything falls into place. It included Spotted Flycatchers and a Bullfinch (in the same tree), a Whinchat, and even a surprise Bittern. But it was the reserve's star attraction that stole the show:

Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis)

Return visits later in the month uncovered a Small Copper butterfly (the first one I can recall seeing at the reserve), plenty of Willow Emerald damselflies, Lizards, and this juvenile Green Woodpecker:

Green Woodpecker (Juvenile) 

October
Winter birds start arriving along the coast, including this handsome Brambling at North Foreland:

Brambling (Fringilla montifringilla) 

November
Not the best photo, but arguably the best bird of the year; Scott Haughie's White-billed Diver (in summer plumage!) which attracted birders and photographers from across the country:

White-billed Diver (Gavia adamsii) 

I expect I'll be frowned on in some quarters for including it, but this ESCAPED Hoopoe brought some entertainment (unless you're a grub) to an unlikely part of Thanet:

Grub's Up (again)

December
Another month, another loon; a Red-throated Diver (not in summer plumage) in Ramsgate Harbour:

Red-throated Diver (Gavia stellata)

All the photos on this page were taken with a Canon 80D DSLR and the trusty Tele Vue-60 refractor.

In the next post, I will be returning to outer space.

Wednesday 22 August 2018

A Journey into Astrophotography

I'll say one good thing for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Retweeted; he's encouraged me to turn my attention away from this increasingly nonsensical planet and back into deep space*. I've dabbled with astrophotography before (hand-tracking with a 50 mm lens), but mostly I've stuck to the brighter objects like the moon and Jupiter. Long-exposure astrophotography at focal lengths greater than 300 mm requires precise motorised tracking, but it was only after a trip to Astrofest 2018 (and some intensive research) that I figured out a practical and affordable way to go about it.

Here's a picture of the trusty Tele Vue-60 (the same scope I use for most of my wildlife shots) in its latest mode atop the equally trusty Vixen Super Polaris mount (fitted with Skywatcher dual-axis motor drives and an ADM dovetail plate adaptor):


With a field-flattener attached the TV-60 is roughly equivalent to a lens of 400 mm focal length. So far, this arrangement is good enough for exposures up to about two minutes duration depending on the accuracy of my polar alignment. (The Skywatcher handset does have an ST-4 port for autoguiding should I wish to attempt longer exposures in the future.) Here's another angle showing the motor drives attached to the Right Ascension and Declination axes:


Any serious astrophotographers visiting this blog might be shaking their heads at this point and muttering about vignetting and edge-of-field distortion, red sensitivity, thermal noise etc. in much the same way that serious wildlife photographers might mutter about autofocus and aperture control when they see what I'm using. But the point is, I don't get enough clear, moonless nights a year to justify spending the kind of megabucks that others spend on their gear. And, crucially, I can use the same DSLR and the same little scope for multiple purposes (which probably explains why the focuser is starting to look a little worse for wear). And (whisper it quietly) one good photo of the Orion Nebula looks very much like another good photo of the Orion Nebula, no matter where you are on the earth. Unless you have your own observatory equipped with an adaptive optics system, you're probably not breaking new ground.

That's not to say I won't be eagerly imaging the Orion Nebula when I get the chance just like every other amateur, but M42 is a spectacle of the winter sky, so for my first target I chose the globular cluster M13 (because it's big, bright, and not too far away from the north celestial pole):

M13 Globular Cluster
M13, Tele Vue-60 + Canon 80D (30 x 1 min @ ISO 800)

The long exposure times required to make an image like this turn pinprick stars into blobs of light, giving the false impression that they are almost touching each other. Although direct interactions in globular clusters do occasionally happen (the most likely origin of blue stragglers), the average distance between stars in a typical globular is actually 0.1 to 0.5 light-years, a fraction of the distance between here and Proxima Centauri (4.2 light-years), but still many times the size of our planetary system. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope resolves the core of M13, giving a better impression of the star density. Around 150 globular clusters are known to orbit our galaxy, dipping in and out of the galactic plane in highly inclined orbits. To put that in perspective, M87, the giant galaxy at the heart of the Virgo Cluster, is surrounded by 16,000 globular clusters.

I recently had the pleasure of looking at M13 through a 10-inch telescope and the result was breath-taking (so much so that I completely forgot to look for NGC 6207 - the "little" galaxy visible towards the bottom-left of the image above).

In my 4-inch achromat M13 takes on the appearance of a "grainy snowball thrown against a pane of glass", always on the brink of being resolved but never quite making it, except when averted vision is employed. In the 10-inch scope (at 133x magnification with a 9mm Nagler eyepiece) it was transformed into a vast three-dimensional city of stars, its brighter members glinting like crushed diamonds right across the face of the cluster, with hundreds - perhaps thousands - more revealing themselves in averted vision. The longer I looked, the more impressive it became, as I began to discern chains of stars arcing out from the centre.

M13 is arguably the most spectacular globular cluster visible from UK latitudes, but there are several others which run it close, such as M3 in the constellation Canes Venatici:

Messier 3
M3, Tele Vue-60 + Canon 80D (31 x 1 min @ ISO 800)

Of course, acquiring the images is only half the battle; processing them is an art-form in itself. I'll leave those details for another time as I'm still very much a beginner at this, but if you want to know what software I used, the links are here.

In the meantime, if you ever get the opportunity to look at M13 or any of the other showpiece globulars through a medium to large-sized telescope, I strongly recommend it. Drink in the spectacle, contemplate what you're seeing, and then look at it again. Photographs just can't do it justice.

See more of my TV-60 deep-sky photos on Flickr.


*Famous last words... While I was drafting this post, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Retweeted announced the creation of SPACE FORCE (I swear I can hear the echo as I'm typing it). It seems there really is no escape from the Tangerine Nightmare.

Sunday 13 May 2018

Birds of East Kent: Kestrel

Latest in an occasional series of posts discussing the different birds that can be found in East Kent and how easy (or not) it is to get a decent picture of them.

Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus)

I don't usually bother with top-ten lists or stuff like that, but if I had to choose a favourite bird it would undoubtedly be the Kestrel. It's not the biggest (or smallest) bird of prey; nor is it the most colourful. It's not even the only British bird that hovers, though the other contenders can't hope to match its precision or its tenacity. But, more than any other bird, it's always been a small part of my life in some shape or form. It was there on the striking red badge I received when I joined the YOC:


It was there in Ken Loach's famous film (adapted from the novel by Barry Hines) that I saw in my early teens. And it was there at the start and end of the summer holidays, glimpsed from the side window of a car; a bird that seemed to defy not just gravity but time itself as it hovered above the roadside verges while the twentieth century flowed around it.

Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus)

I've had the privilege of seeing a wild kestrel up close on a couple of occasions, most recently in February of this year when I encountered one perched in a small tree by the North Foreland golf course. I took some photos and continued on to Botany Bay to see if there was anything interesting on the shore. When I turned around to walk back I was surprised to see the same kestrel standing on a fence post. Naturally, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take some more photos:

Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus)

From badges to films to poetry (see: The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins) there is something about the kestrel that seems ingrained in the British psyche. A good example of this can be found in Powell and Pressburger's 1944 wartime classic A Canterbury Tale. In the film's prologue, a group of medieval pilgrims make their way towards Canterbury while a voiceover narrates a passage from Chaucer's text. A falconer stops to release a kestrel into the sky. The bird dips and soars ... and transforms into a Spitfire flying above the English countryside. Four hundred years of history spanned in a single cut.


If the description of that scene rings a bell it's because Stanley Kubrick used the same trick in the famous bone-to-spacecraft transition in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Coincidence, homage or blatant rip-off? It's a question that's been debated for fifty years, and will probably be debated for fifty more. In the meantime, the kestrel continues to soar above fields, along cliff-tops, and across marshes - hovering, observing, sometimes descending for prey, and then moving on, seeing colours that no human eye can see as it patiently constructs its daily map of the world.

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air. 
Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain (1957)


See also:
More of my Kestrel photos on Flickr
Kestrel (RSPB)
Kestrel (Birdforum)
Kestrel (Birdguides)