Backyard Spring Nature in New Jersey.
The Tax Man Cometh.
David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Early this morning NASA launched five sounding rockets from Wallops Island, Virginia over a seven minute period to study the jet stream in the upper atmosphere at the edge of space. Once the rockets reached the thermosphere they were set to release trimethyaluminum that would react to create a cloud of aluminum oxide. This mission has been canceled several times waiting for clear skies from New Jersey to South Carolina. I set up a Nikon D3x camera with a 14-24 mm f/2.8 wide angle lens and pointed it south-east to capture an image every minute starting just after midnight to see if I could to catch something from the mission. The rockets were launched starting just before 5 AM (EDT).
The following is a composite of 40 images combined using the startrails program showing the release from all 5 rockets. You see the star trails, a couple of jet trails, all five of the ATREX rocket cloud releases and as a bonus a meteor trail.
I have gone the entire winter and only saw a couple of Stink Bugs in the house. So tonight, while cooking dinner this Stink Bug decided to become a target while I was cooking dinner.
Just wondering if anyone is viewing my “Image of the Day” photo blog”. I have not posted anything for the last month, and didn’t get any feedback wondering where I was or if there would be more posts. The blog has been getting 20-40 spam messages a day to older posts, which I do not pass forward. At the same time, I have been posting images almost every day to Google+, mainly to various “Daily Photography Themes“. For these posts, I get many pluses (+) and comments. I am trying to figure out if there is a real audience to “My Image of the Day” photo blog. Please comment either to this blog or by e-mail.
I was out in the backyard trying to get images of the birds wintering in New Jersey. I noticed a shadow, turned around and caught this turkey vulture flying past the moon.
It was really cold out when I found this small bird trying to keep warm above my front door. It kept flying around and getting bits of the spider webs caught on its beak and wings. These images were taken with my “go anywhere” Nikon D300 camera and 18-200 mm lens with the pop-up flash. I did need to remove the lens hood to prevent a shadow in the image.
Individual images in the slide-show can be viewed here.