Today we have two disparate but engaging items: a photo and a video.
The video (no ducks were harmed in this clip!) comes from our friend Tara Tanaka, whose note are indented (her Vimeo site is here, and her Flickr site is here). Be sure to enlarge the video before watching. (Tara promises more video of young wood storks soon.)
This spring our very large female alligator brought her 20+ babies to the end of a little spit of land that sticks out in the swamp from our yard and set up camp there for almost two months. From her lookout she could see two Wood Duck boxes not more than fifty feet away, and there were hens incubating eggs in each box. We’ve had gators appear just as baby ducks hatch, and I knew that she would be able to hear the babies when they eventually hatched. I was really worried that a hen would drop to the water to bring her babies out, and the gator would make the most of the “sitting ducks.” I didn’t want to see it in person, but I did want to know what happened. For weeks I got up early and set up one camera on the back porch that would include the area around both boxes, and I also set up two cameras using very high focal lengths in the living room window – one pointed at each box.
At least twice a day the gator could see the drakes come by and “pick up” their hens to feed, and then again see them “drop them off” at their boxes. Apparently the gator had watched the hen enter the box on the left numerous times and assumed that she entered that hole and flew through the back of the box. On this morning I had put out the wide angle camera about 7:05am, and at 7:11 this was what occurred. The gator launched herself at least 3 1/2′ in the air – probably using her tail against the bottom in the shallow water.Unfortunately we went out of town during the time that we think the babies hatched, however we did see a brood of 8 with one hen and a brood of 2 with another a couple of weeks after we returned. We don’t know why, but when they were about 4 weeks old I saw the 2 ducklings and the group of 8 ducklings alone in the swamp, and I never saw either of their mothers again. The 8 became 6 and they adopted the 1 that survived of the 2, and they raised themselves all alone in the swamp until the other day when they all began flying. They are in smaller groups now, flying into the yard to feed.
And then, from reader Tim Anderson in Oz, we have an astronomy photo. His notes:
NGC 6744 is a face-on spiral galaxy in the Pavo constellation, which is close to the Southern Cross. Also visible in the image are several faint galaxies.
The image was made from sixty 300-second subframes taken with an ASI071MCPro camera and a Skywatcher Esprit 100mm refractor on an EQ8 mount. Average guiding RMS of 0.11 arcseconds (best I have ever achieved).
Robert Sapolsky makes an interesting point about the way the brain responds to huge increases in the scale of particular stimuli; it does it by ignoring the scale altogether, and after a certain point it just plateaus and increases in scale barely register.
Which makes intuitive sense of course, otherwise the sadness of considering one person’s death would be six million times more intense if we considered the holocaust. It also explains why a lottery winner who wins ten million dollars isn’t a hundred thousand times happier than someone who wins a hundred dollars.
But I guess the downside is that it curtails our ability to really appreciate, to really feel, the immensity of something like the amazing photo of a galaxy above.
I’m awed by photos of the grand canyon. But I’m not a thousand times as awed by a photo of Europe taken by an orbiting satellite. My awe plateaus at a certain level, the level that evolution adapted me to understand and deal with. Beyond that level I begin not to feel anything emotional at all, unless I force myself to reason through what I’m looking at, and even then it’s a kind of awe at my own mute incomprehension.
(I don’t know if any of that made sense)
It did to me…thank you for the explanation.
That is a gorgeous galaxy and quite a video.
I used to have an absolutely wonderful photography book(I can’t for the life of me remember the name of it) that went from the very smallest objects ever photographed to the very largest; from electron microscope images of molecules to the Hubble ultra-deep field photo.
Even though the most interesting photos are at the extremes, the photos that are comprehensible are all in the middle. I would spend literally hours staring at the pictures of galaxies, trying to take in on an instinctive level what I was looking at…and I never really came close. It’s always frustrated me a bit.
The book (or the one I know about anyway) is Eames “Powers of Ten”
Here’s what Google turned up as a video:
That made perfect sense to me. I’ve always been of the opinion that the experience of life…living…has to do with the way an individual brain (bunch of neurons) absorbs data. Thus, it is statistically likely that we individual humans are forced into a rather narrow experiential bandwidth. We can’t do overload. Unfortunately, most people seem to think that the window of happiness is infinite. This leads to frustration, because it is constrained by this window of real experience. Someone who wins the lottery soon becomes subject to ennui. That’s just the way it is. Better to accept that truth than to pursue nirvana.
The reasoning on the part of that alligator astonishes me even more than the leap.
It does me too, although it was the leap that made me decide not to paddle right by her and her babies when she had our canoe boxed in by a narrow canal…
Awesome galaxy photo, and just crazy that you can take a picture with your camera of something so far away.
Your swamp is scary. 🙂
Galaxies are hard to figure, but still beautiful. Like Saul said above.
Tim, a 100mm refractor is a nice piece of glass! I once tried grinding a 150mm reflector with a degree of success. I used two blanks of pyrex glass, which being thermally stable, minimizes distortion in the image. The next time I tackle such a project – if there is a next time -, I shall use blanks of plain window glass, which will be quicker to grind and adequate for non-photograhic viewing ( I think), thermal distortions be damned!
What a wonderful wetland you have in your back yard, Tara! I wouldn’t even get in a canoe though knowing that such a large alligator is in residence.
Beautiful galaxy photo and intense video. I would not want to witness a jumping alligator in person. Can’t recall ever seeing that before today.