Readers’ wildlife photos

Once again I importune you to send in your wildlife photos, as I’m running a bit low and may ultimately have to suspend this feature.  Thanks!

We have some diverse photos today. The first is from Gary Womble, who had an encounter of the Sandhill Crane kind:

These two dinosaurs (Antigone canadensis) walked right up to us at Tom Bennett Park in Bradenton, FL

From David Fuqua:

I recently encountered this rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) along the Arkansas River in Colorado.

American Bison (Bison bison) and Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana). According to Wikipedia, the pronghorn is not an antelope and its closest relative is the giraffe.

From Ed Suominen (in northeast Washington state), whose website is here:

I took the Milky Way photo the night before last [on Sept. 6] using a Lumix pocket camera with a Leica lens, one of the better ones you can find that will actually fit in a pocket. I put a couch pillow on my driveway, propped the camera on it just so, and set the timer to open the shutter after 2 seconds for a 20-second exposure. The f/1.4 aperture pulls in a lot of light during that time.

I did a little bit of post-processing with Adobe Lightroom to maximize the contrast between light and dark parts of the sky, added just a modest increase in color saturation with a reduction of green and yellow luminance to reduce the effect of light pollution from Spokane, which is some fifty miles away behind a mountain but whose lights still keep my area from having what astronomers would consider a truly dark sky.

Here is a link to the full-resolution image from my website. Please feel free to download and use to your heart’s content: http://edsuom.com/pics/milky-way-2048px.jpg

JAC: Wouldn’t the high-res image make a nice backdrop photo for your computer? But if you post it, be sure to give proper credit to Ed.