Looking through my DSLR photos from last night, it's clear I was more interested in watching the aurora than photographing it 😬
And I thought about binning this shot for being massively out-of-focus 🙄
But y'know, it has a certain colourful charm, not least because Ursa Major is writ large in the corner, & maybe it's fine to just go with the flow 🤷♂️
I had a feeling that I’d see my first #dragonfly of the year today & I was right 🙂
A new species for me too – a male hairy hawker (Brachytron pratense) sunbathing in the grass 😻
Initially similar to other hawkers, like the migrant (Aeshna mixta) which I see a lot of, the hairy hawker flies much earlier in the year & is, well, hairy 🤷♂️🙂
Anyone know what the pink blob is under the anal appendages?
“Where the clouds are made of candy floss”
– Jacky, “White Horses”, 1968
Somehow this song & the associated Yugoslav-German TV series came to mind from my early childhood as the sky was filled with mares’ tails this morning 🙂🤷♂️
Apologies for posting endlessly on this topic, but #ICYMI, here's another shot of the beautiful circumzenithal arc that graced the icy skies above our house yesterday.
This one was taken with my DSLR rather than my phone, so arguably better quality & thus worth uploading.
Here's that "mystery" ice halo from earlier today, soon after the circumzenithal arc disappeared – a short, colourful arc WNW of the Sun & concave to it.
I've measured it carefully using a later image of a sundog to calibrate the camera FOV) & it is 50º from the Sun.
That very likely means it's a fragment of a supralateral arc, formed in hexagonal ice columns.
Ah ha, one of my favourite garden friends paid a visit today: a hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum) doing its best to illustrate the principles of convergent evolution 🙂
This is a 240fps slow-motion video: in real-time, it was flitting around like crazy, very briefly supping from each flower with its long probocis. Am happy the phone stayed in focus most of the time.