Category: astronomy

Reader’s wildlife photos

August 17, 2026 • 8:15 am

For this edition we include the Sun and Moon as wildlife, as Jan Malik reports on the solar eclipse of April, 2024. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  Oh, and Google “solar eclipse 2024” and see what you get!

The recent total solar eclipse in Europe reminded me of the Great North American Eclipse of April 8, 2024, which I had the opportunity to observe from the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

After spending the night in the back of my truck, I set off early in the morning toward the summit of Whiteface Mountain. This being early April, the roads and trails were still snowbound, which allowed for decent skiing. Whiteface Mountain, like Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, features a scenic toll road open in the summer. In winter, this path converts into a gentle, 5-mile cross-country ski course, safe even for bungling skiers like myself. I met another skier on my way up; our goal for the day was to reach the summit before 1 p.m., when the eclipse was about to begin:

The area was still quite snowy, and the summit observatory building was plastered solidly with snow:

In the summer, Whiteface Mountain is a tourist attraction and one of the few places in the USA where you can see the metric system at work:

The toll road winds up the mountain at a steady 8-degree incline. If you look closely, you can spot three hikers making their way up. Our main concern for the day was to pick an outlook with a clear view of the sky. Adirondack weather is notoriously unpredictable, but we were lucky that day, with only some wispy clouds in the sky:

As predicted, at about 1 p.m. we could see the Moon bite off a small piece of the Sun. All observations of the Sun must be done through a dark solar filter, except during totality. The filter I had bought was not of very high quality; it had an orange cast and severe dispersion issues:

After about half an hour, little remained of the Sun in my viewfinder:

Even with 99% of the Sun covered, it was still bright outside, but the light had an unusual, unsettling quality—quite subdued, but with a color temperature equal to normal daylight. Normally, we experience diminished light only at sunset or sunrise, when the color temperature shifts toward red, but here it happened almost at high noon. The picture doesn’t fully convey that experience; you have to see it to understand the strangeness of the moment:

Then it happened. Seemingly within a single second, the light went out, as if someone had flipped a giant switch, and what we saw above our heads no longer resembled our familiar day star. That was the only time we could observe the Sun with the naked eye. It is not a sensation easily described by words, but I—and I am sure everyone else—was stunned and overwhelmed by this transition from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. If you look closely, there are a few solar prominences visible in the lower half of the Sun’s disk, each of them larger than the Earth’s diameter:

Totality in this part of the Adirondacks lasted a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and that time passed quickly. Everyone was absorbed in the moment, trying to capture as much of it as possible, both in memory and on their devices. It became noticeably colder, and the only non-human animal present—a pet dog—started barking, unable to comprehend why the world had changed so abruptly:

We were in the so-called umbra (totality), but in the distance we could clearly see the distant horizon glowing where the shadow ended, marking the transition back to partial daylight:

The Sun high above frozen Lake Placid:

I was not prepared for the momentary shock of transitioning from the commonplace to the unworldly and let my photographic guard down, missing the “diamond ring” effect, where the Sun begins to shine again from behind the Moon’s cover. But some moments in life should be savored by observing rather than documenting:

The “diamond ring” lasts only a second or two, and after that, the switch is turned back on and the light reappears. The thermal death of the universe having been averted, it is back to using the filter to protect both eyesight and the camera:

As a bonus picture, here is the entire sequence of the Moon passing in front of the Sun’s surface over 2 hours. The colors are a bit uneven due to an unfortunate choice of camera settings—live and learn. The black specks are sunspots:

At the beginning of that day, I was curious if the hype surrounding the eclipse was somewhat inflated by the tourism lobby or if it was something truly worth seeing. In the afternoon, skiing down the toll road while trying to control my emotions, I knew that it was a mind-altering event that everyone should experience once in their life. I was lucky that it happened in my Adirondack backyard, with hassle-free access and familiar surroundings, but I would now travel far just to see one. The next eclipse, with an exceptionally long totality of more than 6 minutes, will occur over North Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia on August 2, 2027. People will be streaming in by the hundreds of thousands to see it, but crowds or not, I promise you will not regret it. Now is a good time to start making travel arrangements.

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 19, 2026 • 8:30 am

Today’s photos come from Dean Graetz, who notes, “I offer an unusual contribution to Readers wildlife photos.  It is an unusual personal story.” Dean’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. 

A Wild Life Extinction

Some 50 years ago, I encountered an unfamiliar way of Life.  It was a Wild Life: the lifestyle of Aboriginal people who have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Australian deserts for the last 60,000 years.  I met three old men, likely 60+ years of age, who could recall their first sighting of ‘Whitefellas’.  Their early lives were as nomadic hunter-gatherers, one that could be perilously difficult.  So, I began to follow any published stories of the desert dwellers from then until now, 50 years later, when they have stopped.  Some photos are mine with historic others borrowed from the Public Domain.  This was the spirit of the encounter.  There were 6 people in that vehicle

The location was Amata, in South Australia:  Aboriginal land: home of the Pitjantjatjara, a language which every member of the party spoke but me.  It was in one of the 10 named Australian deserts where the landscapes are as spectacular as the night sky.  Some important Dreaming stories are based on the constellations interpreted as the activities of animals, such the Emu, or people:

Because it is customary to bring gifts to your hosts, we shot two Red Kangaroos (Macropus rufus) knowing that they would be enjoyed as ‘properly good tucker’:

Our shot kangaroo retriever (effortlessly carrying 30+ kilos) was an important ‘law’ man and hunter.  By incredible chance, I knew of him (by name) from reading an anthropologist’s (1972) account of him:

His fame came from his ability to spear eagles in flight.  An astonishing skill:

It was difficult to hide the presents that we were bringing:

The three elders were happy to receive us with our gift of kangaroos.  Note that they are smallish men, likely protein-limited in early life, now getting ‘fat and shiny’ on store-bought food.  As an intruder, I took very few photos.  I noticed they were urinary incontinent but was later told that, as a condition of manhood, they had been circumcised as teenagers, then later they had opted to be sub incised (aka ‘whistle-dicked’) and were very proud of the seniority and masculine status that conferred.  Their dress and traditional accommodation (‘Wiltja’) in the background was their choice ignoring Whitefella’s available welfare.  The desert landscape was exceptionally lush in 1974; it was the wettest year on record:

They were reluctant (hand covering mouth) to talk about their younger days when there were no Whitefellas around.  They smiled at recalling their family group’s long travels – walkabout-  to hunt and ‘see’ their country.  They admitted that they ate more lizards than fat kangaroos, and there were some ‘tough times’ that were not be talked about.  Later, the three elders and their wives – who had been hidden – plus a few friends waited, for 20 minutes of cooking on an open fire, to eat the two kangaroos at one long evening sitting.  Around the neighbouring Whitefella campfire, the considered opinion of hunter-gatherers was that in 1974, ‘there is no one out there now’.  “All gone: all finish him up!”:

This brief contact was an end point of a long personal and professional interest in the desert landscapes and in the people who surprisingly endured their harshness.  As a university student (1950s) I was intrigued by photos, such as this, of full grown Aboriginal men (beards) but with teenager-sized bodies.  It had to be the result of malnourishment.  Why did they live there?  And, more importantly, how did they live there?:

In 1974, these questions were now in the past tense.  There were no hunter-gathering people still ‘out there’, living out their ‘wild’ lives.  Because of government concern for their welfare, efforts ensured they had all been ‘contacted’.  The deserts, ‘their country’, were now empty of its intriguing inhabitants.

Not so!  In 1977, a search party located a couple hiding for 30 years in the remote Gibson Desert fearing tribal vengeance – ‘The last of the Nomads’.  Then, in 1984, a small group, The Pintupi Nine, walked out of the desert and made contact – as below on day 2, first clothes.  Next, in 1986, a family group of seven (Richters/Rictors) emerged from the Great Victoria Desert.  Now 40 years later, we can conclude that hunter-gatherers are now extinct across  the Australian continent:

 

The hunter-gatherer life requires self-sufficiency.  Your food is only what you can find or kill.  Your tools are only what you can make.  Your only ability to manipulate the landscape is the fire that you ignite, and you control.

Does it matter that this nomadic way of life is no longer pursued in Australia?  No: but an understanding of what and when it was is important for our societal memory.  This quote from a historian says it all.

“Perhaps all people on Earth need a sense of the continuing existence of ‘nomads’, for all of our ancestors were once so.  They remind us of who we are.”

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 2, 2026 • 8:30 am

Send in your photos if you got ’em, please!

Today’s photos continue the series taken by reader Ephraim Heller in Namibia. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Today I continue my series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems. Today’s post features Damaraland, a 48,000 km² region in the northwest of the country.

Damaraland is not a formal administrative region, but a geographic and cultural designation. It is a jumble of granite kopjes, basalt plateaus, flat-topped mountains, broad gravel plains, and eroded canyon systems. Like much of Namibia, it is desert. Here is an aerial view, taken from the window of a small airplane:

Life is sparse here. A handful of ephemeral rivers cross Damaraland, cutting westward from the interior highlands to the Skeleton Coast along the Atlantic Ocean. These rivers flow above ground for only a few days per year following significant inland rainfall, but each bed sits atop an alluvial aquifer that retains water from flood events for months to years. This subsurface water sustains a few trees, shrubs, and animals along the riverbeds. Here’s another aerial view showing the path of an ephemeral river:

By far the coolest critter I found was the longleg armoured corncricket (Acanthoplus longipes), which has superpowers. It is a large, flightless katydid brandishing big, spiny legs and a heavily armored (American spelling) pronotum. When attacked, individuals autohaemorrhage, shooting a jet of toxic hemolymph from the leg joints toward attackers. I wish I had a superpower like that:

Naturally, any creature with such a magnificent superpower fluoresces under UV light:

Frankly, the rest of this post is anticlimactic. What could possibly beat a longleg armoured corncricket? Not a pretty brush jewel beetle (Julodis humeralis):

A Namib rock agama (Agama planiceps) doesn’t beat a longleg armoured corncricket, not even when it is chowing down on a bug:

One night I went on a walk to see what would fluoresce under my UV light. I found this gecko. Sure, fluorescence is cool and I wish I could do it, but does this gecko autohaemorrhage? No, it does not. The folks at iNaturalist couldn’t identify it – apparently one needs the visible spectrum to make a positive ID:

This is tentatively identified as an orange lesser-thicktail scorpion (Uroplectes planimanus), another critter with the minor UV-fluorescence superpower. Interestingly, researchers do not know why scorpions evolved fluorescence.

Now for the birds. Sadly, they have no superpowers at all. Our lodge had a water feature that was the only surface water for miles around. I spent hours watching the birds bathe and drink.

A violet-backed starling (Cinnyricinclus leucogaster). The color is produced not by pigment but by thin-film interference: stacks of hollow melanosomes in the feather barbules refract light at specific wavelengths. The male can modulate its apparent coloration through posture:

A black-fronted bulbul (Pycnonotus nigricans):

A Namaqua dove (Oena capensis):

A red-headed finch (Amadina erythrocephala):

The southern masked weaver (Ploceus velatus). Egg color varies among females, allegedly as a defense against brood parasitism by the Diederik cuckoo. Because the cuckoo cannot know egg color before entering the nest, color polymorphism in the weaver population raises the probability of parasite detection and egg ejection. Not a superpower, but cool nonetheless. I just like the bokeh in this photo:

Finally, the requisite Namibian desert night sky photos:

Reader’s wildlife photos

June 23, 2026 • 8:15 am

Why is this feature like lox and a schmear? A: Because it’s on a roll. (Sort of.) I now have a total of four sets of photos in the queue, one of which I’ll post today. But please send your good photos, and a warm handshake to those who have done so.  I hope people realize that readers who send in good add a unique feature for this website: high-quality and delightful pictures of nature. Do compliment the photographer if you like their photos.

Today we have pictures from Ephraim Heller, documenting his recent trip to Namibia. (More will be coming.) Ephraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Today I begin a series on a May-June 2026 visit to Namibia. I’m organizing the posts by habitat, in the order of our visits, so that you get a sense of the ecosystems.

The Namib Desert is the oldest desert on earth, with conditions that have persisted for 55 – 80 million years. At ~80,950 square km (31,250 sq mi), it is far and away the largest desert I have visited. It stretches ~2,000 km (1,200 mi) along southwest Africa’s Atlantic coast, including the entire length of Namibia. There is essentially no rain at all near the coast (2 mm/year average), but in places there is coastal fog that is the primary source of water for the desert plants. The stable climate over millions of years has resulted in high endemism. Of the ~3,500 documented species in the Namib, more than 1,000 are endemics.1-2. On the drive from the capital, Windhoek, visitors pass through Solitaire. It consists of a fuel station, a bakery and café, a general store, a small lodge, and a yard decorated with old vehicles. The nearest real town is hundreds of kilometers distant. When vehicles broke down, cars and trucks were simply left. Some of the collection includes American classics from the mid-twentieth century:

While having lunch at a picnic table in Solitaire, I observed several yellow mongooses (Cynictis penicillata) playing. Technically, Solitaire is semi-desert, so there are a few shrubs for the mongoose. They often share burrow systems with the local ground squirrels (Xerus inauris), which confused me as I tried to decide if I was seeing mongooses or ground squirrels. This is a mongoose:

Our destination in the Namib desert was Sossusvlei, where the sand dunes are among the highest in the world. “Dune 7” dune, the tallest, is 388 m (1,273 ft) in height. Vlei is the Afrikaans word for “marsh,” while sossus is Nama for “no return” or “dead end”.  The area is the drainage basin for the ephemeral Tsauchab river. The Namib Sand Sea, of which the Sossusvlei dune field is a part, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The dunes began forming around five million years ago. Sand from the Orange River was carried west into the Atlantic, swept north by the Benguela Current, then driven back inland by the prevailing south-southwest winds. Over millions of years the sand accumulated into a dune field ~32,000 sq km (12,400 sq mi) in extent. The sand is iron-oxide coated quartz, and younger sand near the base of dunes is paler while older sand higher up is a deeper reddish-orange, due to greater oxidation. The colors in these photos are real, and not simply me going wild with the saturation slider in my photo editing software. For scale, note the full-grown trees at the base of the dune in the first photo.

About a kilometer walk across the sand lies a small clay pan named Deadvlei (meaning “dead marsh”) where reside camelthorn trees (Vachellia erioloba) that have been dead for 600 – 900 years. There has been no water here since the fourteenth century! The combination of extreme dryness and intense heat inhibits microbial activity so thoroughly that the wood is preserved.

Gemsbok (Oryx gazella) and springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) antelope are the primary large mammals of the Namib. Gemsbok can survive for extended periods without drinking free-standing water, meeting their requirements through vegetation. Here is a gemsbok in its habitat:

Here is a herd of springbok in their environment:

Toktokkie beetles (Onymacris unguicularis) are a group of darkling beetles with over 200 species in Namibia, and 20 in the Namib desert. We saw them throughout Namibia. I don’t know the species of this individual, but some species engage in fog-harvesting: when Atlantic fog rolls in, beetles climb to the crests of dunes and orient head-downward, body inclined away from the wind. Water condenses on the elytra, runs along ridges on the beetle’s back, and reaches the mouthparts. A beetle can take in water equivalent to ~40% of its body mass from a single fog event.

The garden locust or tree locust (Acanthacris ruficornis), is widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Tt is technically a grasshopper:

Namaqua doves (Oena capensis) are ubiquitous, but I think they are pretty. They are the smallest doves on the African continent:

The Kalahari tree skink (Trachylepis spilogaster). I had no idea that some skinks are arboreal:

The extreme dryness and very low population density of Namibia make it one of the prime sites for astronomical observatories and night sky photographers:

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 26, 2025 • 8:25 am

Today’s photos come from Wyoming and photographer Ephraim Heller. His IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photo by clicking on them:

My wife and I just returned from a few days of horseback riding and relaxation at a dude ranch near Dubois, Wyoming (pronounced “Du-boiz” with the accent on the first syllable) in the Absaroka Mountains. Dubois’ 82513 ZIP Code includes 1,537 square miles and has a total population of 1,549: a population density of about 1 person per square mile, making it ideal for astrophotography. Butch Cassidy (Robert LeRoy Parker) owned and managed a ranch on the outskirts of Dubois, beginning in 1890.

The Dollar Lake fire began during our stay. First reported on Thursday, August 21 the fire had expanded to 8,660 acres with 0% contained by the following day. The fire grew rapidly due to extremely dry conditions, a heavy load of fuel, and high winds. The forests in this area have a particularly high fuel load due to large stands of beetle-killed lodgepole pines.

Here’s the view south from the ranch toward the galactic center of the Milky Way on the night of Tuesday, August 19:

Here’s the view south from a nearby spot on the night on Friday, August 22:

And here are a few photos of our companions at the ranch, Equus ferus caballus. This one-eyed fellow was very friendly:

Other miscellaneous photos:

Guest post: does atmospheric chemistry suggest there’s life on another planet?

May 30, 2025 • 10:00 am

Today we have a guest post from reader Coel Hellier, who does this kind of stuff for a living. His text deals with the recent kerfuffle about whether a nearby planet shows an atmospheric gas indicative of life.  I particularly like the details about how scientists go about analyzing a question like this. His text is indented, and he’s added the illustrations.

Is the dimethyl sulphide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b real?

Everyone is interested in whether there is life on other planets. Thus the recent claim of a detection of a biomarker molecule in the atmosphere of an exoplanet has attracted both widespread attention and some skepticism from other scientists.

The claim is that planet K2-18b, 124 light years from Earth, shows evidence of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a molecule that on Earth arises from biological activity. Below is an account of the claim; I try to include more science than the does mainstream media, but do so largely with pictures in the hope that the non-expert can follow the argument.

Transiting exoplanets such as K2-18b are discovered owing to the periodic dips they cause in the light of the host star:

And here is the lightcurve of K2-18b, as observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing the transit that led to the claim of DMS by Madhusudhan et al.:

If we know the size of the star (deduced from knowing the type of star from its spectrum), the fraction of light that is blocked then tells you the size of the planet.

But we also need to know its mass. One gets that from measuring how much the host star is tugged around by the planet’s gravity, and that is obtained from the Doppler shift of the star’s light.

The black wiggly line in the plot below is the periodic motion of the star caused by the orbiting planet. Quantifying this is made harder by lots of additional variation in the measurements (blue points with error bars), which is the result of magnetic activity on the star (“star spots”). But nevertheless, if one phases all the data on the planet’s orbital period (lower panel), then one can measure the planet’s mass (plot by Ryan Cloutier et al):

So now we have the mass and the size of the planet (and we also know its surface temperature since we know how far it is from its star, and thus how much heating it gets).  Combining that with some understanding of proto-planetary disks and planet formation. we can thus dervise models of the internal composition and structure of the planet.

The problem is that multiple different internal structures can add up to the same overall mass and radius. One has flexibility to invoke a heavy core (iron, nickel), a rocky mantle (silicates), perhaps a layer of ice (methane?), perhaps a liquid ocean (water?), and also an atmosphere.

This “degeneracy” is why Nikku Madhusudhan can argue that K2-18b is a “hycean” planet (hydrogen atmosphere over a liquid-water ocean) while others argue that it is instead a mini-Neptune, or that it has an ocean of molten magma.

But one can hope to get more information from the detection of molecules in the planet’s atmosphere, a task that is one of the main design goals of the James Webb Space Telescope [JWST]. The basic idea is straightforward: During transit, some of the starlight will shine through the thin smear of atmosphere surrounding the planet, and the different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light in a pattern characteristic of that molecule (figure by ESA):

So one observes the star both during the transit and out of transit, and then subtracts the two, and the result is a spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere.

If the planet is a large gas giant with a fluffy, extended atmosphere and is orbiting a bright star (so that a lot of photons pass through the atmosphere), the results can be readily convincing. For example, here is a spectrum of exoplanet WASP-39b with features from different molecules labelled (figure by Tonmoy Deka et al):

[I include a plot of WASP-39b partly because I was part of the discovery team for the Wide Angle Search for Planets survey, but also because it is pretty amazing that we can now obtain a spectrum like that of the atmosphere of an exoplanet that is 700 light-years away, even while the planet itself is so small and dim and distant that we cannot even see it.]

The problem with K2-18b is that the star is vastly fainter and the planet much smaller than WASP-39b. This is at the limit of what even the $10-billion JWST can do.

When you’re subtracting two very-similar spectra (the in- and out-of-transit spectra)  to look for a rather small signal, any “instrumental systematics” matter a lot. Here is the same spectrum of K2-18b, as processed by several different “data reduction pipelines”, and as you can see the differences between them (effectively, the limits of how well we understand the data processing) are similar in size to the signal (plot by Rafael Luque et al):

The next problem is that there are a lot of different molecules that one could potentially invoke (with the constraint of making the atmospheric chemistry self-consistent). For example, here are the expected spectral features from eight different possible molecules (figure by Madhusudhan):

To finally get to the point, I show is the crucial figure below. Nikku Madhusudhan and colleagues argue — based on an understanding of planet formation, and on arguments that planets like K2-18b are hycean worlds [with a liquid water ocean under a hydrogen-rich atmosphere], and from considerations of atmospheric chemistry, in addition to careful processing and modelling of the spectrum itself — that the JWST spectrum of K2-18b is best interpreted as follows (the blue line is the model, the red error bars are the data):

This interpretation involves large contributions from DMS (dimethyl sulphide) and also DMDS (dimethyl disulphide) — the plot below shows the different contributions separated — and if so that would be notable, since on Earth those compounds are products of biological activity—mainly from algae.

In contrast, Jake Taylor analysed the same spectrum and argues that he can fit it adequately with a straight line, and that the spectral features are not statistically significant. Others point out that the fitted model contains roughly as many free parameters as data points. Meanwhile, a team led by Rafael Luque reports that they can fit the spectrum without invoking DMS or DMDS, and suggest that observations of another 25 transits of K2-18b would be needed to properly settle the matter.

There are several distinct questions here: Are the details of the data processing sufficiently understood? (perhaps, but not certainly); are the relevant spectral features statistically significant? (that’s borderline);  and, if the features are indeed real, are they properly interpreted as DMS? (theorists can usually think of alternative possibilities). Perhaps a fourth question is whether there are abiotic mechanisms for producing DMS.

This is science at the cutting edge (and Madhusudhan has been among those emphasizing the lack of certainty, though the doubts have not always been in news stories), and so the only real answer to these questions is that things are currently unclear. This is a fast-moving area of astrophysics and we’ll know a lot more in a few years.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 12, 2025 • 8:15 am

I remind you once again to send in your photographs as there’s always a need. Thanks!

Today we have some pictures taken by James Blilie and his son Jamie. The captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here is a set of photos from our local area.  We live in far southern Washington state in Klickitat County.  These photos are from Klickitat and Skamania Counties.

A mostly full moon photographed on February 8, 2025:

Two views of Mount Adams from the front porch on our new (2024) home.  Both are taken at sunset.  One is a black and white closeup.  The other also shows our local gang of Black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus).  Mount Adams is about 20 miles directly north of our house:

The next shot shows left to right:  Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and the Goat Rocks Wilderness from the top of a local ridge.  I took this on March 1, 2025:  It was 60°F (16°C) and sunny, unusual for the first of March!  The view is well worth the work on this hike:

The next bunch of photos were taken at the Wind River Arboretum in Skamania County, definitely on the wet (west) side of the Cascade Range.

A cross-section of the purportedly largest Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) found in Washington state and the placard that accompanies it.  The section was taken at 60-feet (18m) above the ground and the tree was determined to be 393-feet (120m) tall:

[JAC: I can’t help pointing out the superfluous apostrophe in the park sign below.]

Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata):  Foliage and a (small) example tree:

Two shots by our son Jamie of Bird’s Nest Fungus (Nidulariaceae spp.):

Last year’s Bracken Fern (Pteridium aquilinum), also taken by Jamie:

Views of Sword Ferns (Polystichum munitum), also taken by Jamie:

Equipment:

Mine:

Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera (micro-4/3, crop factor = 2.0)
LUMIX G X Vario, 12-35MM, f/2.8 ASPH lens
LUMIX 35-100mm  f/2.8 G Vario lens
LUMIX G Vario 7-14mm  f/4.0 ASPH lens
LUMIX G Vario 100-300mm F/4.0-5.6 MEGA O.I.S. lens

Jamie’s:

Nikon D5600 (crop factor = 1.5)
Nikkor AF-P DX 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 G VR lens
Sigma 150-600mm f/5.0-6.3 DG OS HSM lens