As I sat by the window of the living room last night, the incessant flashes of lightning outside kept on catching my eye. Mainly 'sheet lightning' behind the cloud illuminating that foreboding sky as it crept slowly across the horizon.
After a good 20 minutes or so, streaks of lighting suddenly began darting through the air between the horizon and the clouds. At first I just watched, but as they become more frequent and, in some sense at least, more reliable; I got the camera gear out and set up for very long exposures using the tripod, timer and some heavy manipulation of the aperture, ISO and shutter speed to capture multiple strikes. I 'lost' the sky and city to burnt out highlights as expected, but simply took another two much shorter exposures to capture them correctly, later merging them to make one correctly exposed frame. Not my usual thing but worth shooting, not just for the photography practice but for the impressive number of lightning strikes too. I stayed dry on the balcony with my camera gear in humid heavy air getting bitten repeatedly by passing mozzies....worth it I think.
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This week I bore witness to a great battle outside in the garden, thankfully my attention was drawn to the window because of the commotion. Looking out I saw an american goldfinch with heel spurs raised crashing into battle. Bouncing back through a cloud of feather dust after the initial confrontation he soon composed himself and returned to meet his adversary head on.
Because they were so equally matched the battle continued this way for several minutes, first backing off then charging heels up meeting perfectly together every time and bouncing back again. Feather dust flew, bits of feather wafted off on the slight breeze and no quarter was given as the battle drew out. Luckily I had grabbed the camera in time, and fired off a number of shots, looking straight on at this wonderful spectacle, perfectly aligned to capture the battle. I know what you are thinking....how.... how are you directly in line with the fight. My secret, this little fellow was fighting his reflection in the house window, and I was on the inside observing, what a wonderful angle to capture, maybe a once in a lifetime occurrence. 6766 years ago, our ancestors watched the last pass of Neowise, the retrograde comet currently illuminating our night skies with the most wonderful, slow orbit. Obviously it would have had a different name back then, and it definitely came with great foreboding for those few homo sapiens observing it's progress across the night sky. Thankfully we're no longer tied to ancient ritual and superstition, says I with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Fortunately for me, the horizon was filled with noctilucent clouds, I have seen these several times but never understood exactly what they were, until Sarahs mum sent me some images of them just a few weeks ago and I looked them up. They are comprised entirely of ice crystals in the upper atmosphere and only visible during astronomical twilight. My response was that I would try to shoot some, so as they say in Canada, this is a twofer. As the evening continued an aurora put in an appearance, a weak one, but welcome nonetheless, it has been quite a while since we saw an aurora from the balcony, largely due to the current solar minimum and associated lack of solar activity. To complete the evening, or morning (as it was now 2am) a long raking 'Steve' appeared in the night sky. A 'Steve' is actually a Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, not a rare event but only recently investigated. They are quite common in Alberta and were actually named by Alberta aurora watchers in 2016. So, all in all, nature has put on a spectacular show this evening, a comet, noctilucent clouds, an aurora and a STEVE. It wasn't until I went back into the house at 2:30am that I suddenly realised how cold I was. Turns out that standing outside in shorts and a T-shirt for 3.5 hours in the late evening/early morning is unwise, even in July. Fortunately, when I crawled into bed Sarah was far too hot and a cuddle met both of our needs.....well that's my take on it anyway. For a few days now I have been mentioning to Sarah that the water in the bird bath is going down fast. In the heat of summer it evaporates entirely after 2 days, but this year it hardly lasts a day and it's not so hot just yet.
Sarah insisted that it must be the heat, after all what else could it be, but it just didn't feel right. I even went out to check if there was a leak somewhere. I couldn't see any leak so refilled the bowl again and came back indoors. Within 10 minutes a Blue Jay appeared and hopped into the water, then he began thrashing around like a Tasmanian Devil, as he did the water was lapping over the sides in great quantity and suddenly the mystery of the missing water was solved. Looks like I'll be refilling daily this year!! Sarah and I watched another striking sunset from the balcony last night. Much of the cloud drifted away before the very best light, but what remained was illuminated perfectly and put on a lovely show. We particularly liked the ribbon of darker cloud loops that danced along the upper edge of the array. So, at Sarahs insistence, I made a few shots, after all, we all know that I do as I'm told.....some of the time.
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AuthorWe arrived in Calgary, Canada on 29th December 2011 to continue our journey. This blog is intended to keep our family and friends informed whilst we explore Canada.You can use the RSS feed below to stay updated. Categories
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January 2024
The Shaman, West Texas
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