June 24th 2022 Planetary Alignment

Before sunrise on Friday June 24th, 2022, I took some photos of the planetary alignment. From left to right, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were visible. The Moon was to the East, and Saturn was all the way over to the South so I couldn't get them all in the same image. I didn't have a clear enough view of the horizon to see Mercury, but it was there ahead of Venus in the procession.

There were a few clouds occasionally covering Venus, but I was fortunate enough to get some shots including Venus while it was still dark. The sunrise was brightening by the minute as the clouds disappeared.

Birds Summary Collages

I've created new birds galleries! They are summary collage-style pages showing all the birds I've photographed in a calendar year either specifically at home, or everywhere.

The pages are sorted by the date each bird was first photographed, so for example for the yearly yard pages, you can see winter birds at the top of each page, then spring migrants, then generally more uncommon birds toward the end of each year.

Here are pages you can now view:

• All Birds
• All Yard Birds
• 2021 Birds
• 2022 Birds
• 2021 Yard Birds
• 2022 Yard Birds

The above photo is a male Rufous Hummingbird in my backyard in 2022, which can be seen on the "All Birds" page, the "All Yard Birds" page, the "2022 Birds" page, and the "2022 Yard Birds" one as well.

Testing Non-Astro Image Stacking with Drizzle

For astrophotography, an essential technique is image "stacking" where the image data from many many single images is combined to create a much more bright, detailed, and less noisy final image. This is used with many long exposures of nebulae, galaxies, etc, or with many thousands of video frames of planets or the Moon.

It's also common to apply the "drizzle" algorithm to use all the extra data from those many stacked frames to actually increase the pixel count of the final image. By enlarging each source image by 3x in both horizontally and vertically, and applying some math while stacking those images, more pixel data can be extracted from the source.

I was curious how well this stacking with drizzle technique would work for a non-astro photo subject. It turns out it worked quite well!

50 Wordles in 50 Days

Yesterday I completed my 50th Wordle puzzle. Since I had successfully completed all 50 Wordles I'd ever attempted, I figured it was a good stopping point. So long, Wordle. It's been a treat.

February 16th 2022 Full Moon Image Quality Data

I shot 67 photos of the full moon on February 16th with my Canon EOS R6. I tried shooting with a few different apertures (shooting in aperture priority mode) and processed all the images with PIPP, AutoStakkert! 3, and RegiStax 6.

I processed all the images in one batch with PIPP, which allowed me to see PIPP's "quality" rating for all the photos relative to each other. I was curious to see which camera settings resulted in the highest quality rating from PIPP, so I assembled all the photo settings into the table below.