Shoot 2025-01-23-172019 — philthompson.me

Birds
Mandel

Older Gallery All Galleries Newer Gallery

Shoot 2025-01-23-172019

To start things off I have my recent attempts at shooting M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. A larger version and more details are available in my post on astrobin.

A male Anna's Hummingbird has been consistently appearing at the feeder for the last few weeks. I was able to get pretty close to the shots I wanted after waiting for a while near the feeder. I used my reglar f/9 zoom lens, but it was kind of a dark afternoon. I also experimented with a 200m f/2.8 lens since I was able to get pretty close without bothering him. The faster aperture definitely allowed for a lower ISO: the shots of him hovering near the feeder were shot at ISO 4000 with the zoom lens (at f/6.3) and ISO 2000 with the prime lens (at f/3.2). While waiting for him to fly down to drink or perch I was surprised to see a second male Anna's appear and get chased away. Because they appear to have different preferred perches, and I'd been seeing them on both, I guess I had been seeing two separate individuals at the feeder.

Lastly, I have some photos from a quick trip to the coast. I was quite cold and there weren't too many birds where I got the chance to check out the beach. On a more sheltered inland bay I did get to see a few (at least 3) lifer Eared Grebes and a few other nice birds.

My "birds in review" collages can be found here.

Signature

📄 hashes-2025-01-23-172019.txt

📄 hashes-2025-01-23-172019.txt.sig

The above hashes-<date>.txt file contains SHA-256 hashes of all the photos from this shoot. The hashes-<date>.txt.sig is a signature of that hashes file, created with my PGP key. The signature file itself was written to both the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains, in the OP RETURN and Note fields respectively, using the transactions below. In short, this proves that these photos and the signature both existed at the time the transactions were written to the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains. This blog post has more details.

view the BCH tx on blockchair.com: 4d874a3cbcb6172fcd62a0f98b0e2a0bbfd03494464910990a56ec7dfb74b9c5

view the ALGO tx on explorer.perawallet.app: AXZIASJT463Q2MEBEN3QDYYEI4GXUXXMUCKUJEGM3AV5WCBTGBLQ

Monday January 20, 2025

M31 Andromeda Galaxy.

With the recent cold clear air mass over the country I was finally able to try out my new 200mm f/2.8 lens (mentioned above) and star tracker. It wasn't perfectly clear though, so I only shot about 25 minutes of data.

Monday January 20, 2025

M31 Andromeda Galaxy.

A wider version of the above image.

Tuesday January 21, 2025

M31 Andromeda Galaxy.

On the next night it was much more clear, and I shot 60 minutes of data. I had to crop it quite a bit on this main image because I had a terrible ring artifact in the image, but the galaxy itself came out much better. I am thinking the ring may be due to shooting at a wider f/3.5 aperture where f/4 the previous night seemed to work fine. I am guessing a tiny amount of stray light was bouncing off the interior of the lens hood and onto the sensor. The 18-second exposures, stacking an hour's worth of frames, and stretching of the data to see every little detail, might all work together to create the perfectly round ring artifact I was seeing. A larger version and more details are available in my post on astrobin. More research is needed...

Tuesday January 21, 2025

M31 Andromeda Galaxy.

A wider version of the above image.

8:15AM Thursday January 16, 2025

Anna's Hummingbird

8:15AM Thursday January 16, 2025

Anna's Hummingbird