Belted Kingfisher looking for his next spot to strike the water and make a catch
All winter my brother in law Jordan and I have been trying to catch a shot of a Kingfisher. We have encountered them in the past, but it was never quite the right shot. They were too far away, the lighting wasn’t right, or we couldn’t catch the fast things in focus.
Belted Kingfisher calling
A couple of weeks ago while on a walk along the Boise river with my girlfriend I happened to see one at the very end of our walk, perched up on a branch next to a stranded fishing line. Very poetic!
The cherry on top of the encounter was getting one shot of him diving in focus with the fishing line to boot! A fun way to end a walk!
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. Isaiah 26:3-4
The Horsehead Nebula is one of my favorite objects in the night sky. It’s a small dark nebula located just south of the left star in Orion’s Belt. It lies in front of a large star forming region, IC 434, which is basically a big cloud of hydrogen that is ionizing and creating the beautiful and intense red color.
This nebula is a part of the Orion cloud complex which consists of many interest points (more of which is to come soon). It was discovered in 1888 by a Scottish astronomer on a photographic plate and cataloged as Barnard 33 (or B33). The nebula lies south of the left most star in Orion’s Belt, Alnitak.
The black and white version of the image provides more contrast to get a good view of the details of the emission nebula IC 434 behind the horsehead.
The most fascinating part of the ionized region behind the Horsehead is the magnetic fields which, if you look closely enough, channel the gases into whispy streams like rivers on a map.
The 27.5 hours of exposure time reveal the heavy concentration of dust all around the Horsehead that look like a slight brownish glow. The image was captured over 6 nights.
A starless version of the image. The star removal tool I use has a hard time removing Alnitak in Orion’s Belt in the left corner of the image as well as HD 37903 just under the Horsehead. Alnitak is a blue super giant star and is so bright that it can create some difficult conditions to process around
Technical info: – Total integration time: 27.5 hours
Processing: Stacked with Deep Sky Stacker (using Kappa-Sigma method), color calibrated, background extraction, and StarNet star removal in Siril, stretched and further color correction in Adobe Photoshop, denoised using GraXpert, then final star recomposition in Siril.
The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes Joel 2:31
Pi day blood moon! 4 photo HDR image merged in Lightroom. I thought it was going to be clouded over but about 20 minutes before totality the clouds cleared! I got a great view of it through my Nikon D800 and Nikon 200-500mm f5.6 as well as my 20 x 80 astronomy binoculars!
Observing/imaging from my apartment balcony
Some information on yesterday’s early morning blood moon from NASA’s APOD:
On March 14 the Moon was Full. In an appropriate celebration of Pi day, that put the Moon 3.14 radians (180 degrees) in ecliptic longitude from the Sun in planet Earth’s sky. As a bonus for fans of Pi and the night sky, on that date the Moon also passed directly through Earth’s umbral shadow in a total lunar eclipse. In clear skies, the colors of an eclipsed Moon can be vivid. Reflecting the deeply reddened sunlight scattered into Earth’s shadow.
