Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

Reader Tim Anderson has some astronomy photos for us:

Here are three astrophotographs assembled using my 10″ Newtonian telescope and a monochrome camera using narrowband filters to pick out wavelengths emitted by specific kinds of material.

The first is the Horsehead Nebula (officially known as Barnard 33 – Barnard was a fascinating personality, well worth a Google search). This image is made using only emissions from Hydrogen atoms.

The second is the Keyhole Nebula, which lies at the heart of the Carina complex. It is so far south that it is rarely visible to you northern types, and should provide a good reason to visit the infernal regions. This image is comprised of exposures filtered to receive Hydrogen, Oxygen and Sulphur emission.

The third is a galaxy field – one big one and five small ones. Perhaps your readers may care to spot them.

Wintery closeups by reader Ken Phelps:

Some frost on a twig bent by the snow.

And a crop:

Flakes of frost fallen off the twig.

 

Ran across something I’d never noticed before this morning – icicles interfacing with a spider’s web. The depth of field isn’t exactly as deep as I’d like, but I was hand-holding the camera so had to keep the aperture a bit wide. There are larger slightly more detailed versions of some of the images on Flickr.

Tara Tanaka’s been busy, but has provided us with a new video called “The price of protection”. Be sure to watch it on full screen.  Here are her notes (warning: shows nature red in tooth):

I was eating breakfast last July overlooking our backyard swamp, and saw an enormous spray of water out in the cypress trees. I grabbed my binoculars and saw that it was one of our alligators with one of our recently fledged, still naive Wood Storks that had been hunting for food in the shallow water. I grabbed my digiscoping gear and ran out in the yard to video the behavior. The bird was already dead, but it was still hard to watch. I hoped that the parents weren’t watching.

The rookery couldn’t survive without the alligators that patrol the swamp, keeping raccoons from raiding the nests. If you’ve ever been to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm or Gatorland near Orlando, you know that birds understand that nesting over alligators keeps them safe from most predators. Unfortunately the draw for the alligators is that some birds fall – or are pushed by their siblings from their nests when they’re young, and then there are some like this unfortunate stork that fledge, but are not yet savvy enough to keep an eye out for alligators.