Catching up

I haven't checked the cameras out in the woods for six months due to knee surgery and chronic procrastination. If I had gone out earlier I would have seen this HUGE mountain lion from October sooner.

Three coyotes, a bobcat, a couple moose, and an evasive rabbit also made an appearance.

Unfortunately I felt the need to pull all of my good cameras out of the woods. Some dumbass vigilante thinks it is illegal to put trail cameras in national forests, WHICH IT IS NOT as long as you aren't using them to track game in real time. For wildlife observation, they are legal. But this idiot stole the SD card out of one of my cameras, and I'm not the only one he has targeted. Even though my other four cameras were not tampered with, I don't want this dumbass looking further than his usual base of operations and stealing my cards from them also. I put my two crappy Brownings out there just to maintain a presence. Unfortunately, the cable lock only secures the camera, not the SD card, so this criminal could conceivably steal those. Anyway...

Greenhouse snapshots

Two images from April at the greenhouse that I'm finally getting around to posting. These are from the crappy Coleman camera. For better or worse, I pulled my good cameras out of the woods for reasons explained in the next post, so I now have my best Browning in this spot and I am considering going all in with my best Reconyx. These images prove it still snows here in April, and if the forecast is correct we will see some snow in mid-May also.

Impulse purchase

I needed a camera for my greenhouse, and decided to get the cheapest camera I could find on Amazon. It carries a famous brand name, Coleman, but obviously it is a Chinese no-name with the Coleman logo pasted on it. It cost $39.34. It did come with a nice mount to screw it to a wall, which I am planning on using inside the greenhouse...with a different camera (the Gardepro). The Coleman images seem especially soft on the left side, and I don't think it is just because that's the distant part of this image.

This is the latest shot of the Greenhouse interior, taken with the Gardepro. To minimize the constant glare, I'll try mounting it higher up/further to the right and point it down and back toward the middle. Basically it is a security camera. The outside camera will capture all the deer, turkeys and (maybe) moose and bears. For that, I'm planning on using my best camera, the newest Reconyx.

Unless there is a snowstorm, next week I will collect my five cameras from the woods. After I clean them and make sure all the batteries are charged, I'll put three of them back out there. That gives me seven cameras I can use in town, but there's this crappy Coleman and the always-crappy Primos, and two extremely old Brownings included in that number. Here's my preliminary plan, with the best cameras in bold:

• Woods
• Reconyx #7
• Reconyx #2
• Browning #11
• House
• Browning #15
• Browning #5
• Browning #6 aka the Melted Browning
• Primos #4 (sometimes useful for video, not stills)
• Greenhouse
• Reconyx #19 (outside facing the front)
• Coleman #20 (outside, off to one side)
• Gardepro #14 (inside)

The Field

There is an empty 4-acre lot to the west behind our house. I suppose the owners are planning to build their retirement home someday, but until last summer they hadn't even mowed it since 2020. The HOA started sending out threatening letters telling everyone to mow their lots, otherwise it would be done for them and they would get a bill.

I used to have a camera pointed into that field, but when it was unmowed for years, the tall waving grass would give thousands of false triggers. The field was mowed a few months ago, and I finally put a camera up a few weeks ago. There have been very few false triggers. There's nothing out of the ordinary besides the usual deer and a fox. Apparently I need to level the camera, which is the old Melted Browning #6. It still has the same old problem of the color balance varying between the center (red) and the edges (blue-green).

Also included here are a few shots of deer and turkeys at the greenhouse, which is about a mile from the house, closer to town. The camera is the Gardepro close focus. I didn't use the Gardepro at all last winter because I didn't need the close focus capability, but here with limited space between the camera and the greenhouse it seems to be the right choice. Moose have been known to pass through the area, but the camera hasn't gotten any of those yet.

Next comet

I tried one more time with Comet Lemmon last night, and it seems the window has passed to get anything better than what I got two nights ago. The SeeStar is going back in its case to await the next comet. I did two DSOs last night after the comet set just to explore new capabilities. The M31 Andromeda image is a cropped mosaic of stacked 4K images, and the other one is a cropped 4K image of M81 Bode's Galaxy. I don't think they are any better than what I got last year shot at the native resolution. I have concluded that the SeeStar is an easy-to-use telescope for the occasional comet. I have some more advanced telescope equipment that, to be honest, I really haven't taken the time to learn how to use. When deciding on how to spend my golden years, they are more likely to be spent in a greenhouse in the daylight rather than fumbling around in the dark and cold.

Comet Lemmon

I haven't had the Seestar out this year. Let's face it, once you get images of a few familiar galaxies and nebulas, there's not much else it can do. So it sits in its case waiting for something new to come along, such as a comet. Last night it was cloudy on the horizon and I got a bad image of Comet C2025 A6 Lemmon. Tonight it was better and I'm showing two images here. The first one was just before it set behind Red Lodge Mountain, which is the black area along the bottom. The second one is from a few minutes earlier and was the longest exposure time I managed to get. There are a lot of meteors or satellites or something streaking across this image. There was one in the first image, which I removed in Photoshop.

Through the binoculars, the comet was a faint smudge, aided slightly by averted vision. I could not see it without the binoculars.

The first image was downloaded later from the telescope and does not have the watermark. I though this version was a bit better than the phone version. The second image was downloaded from my phone and has the watermark. There is a large FIT file, the equivalent of a RAW file. But it has to be edited in a specialized program such as Siril because Photoshop can't load FIT files. Last year I found out this is not a straightforward process, so I decided any improvement over the automatically-generated JPG images was incremental at best and usually not worth messing with. Both images were processed from the JPG files in Photoshop to increase contrast and reduce noise.

ZWO has not released an upgrade to the Seestar S50 since I got mine last year, but has issued a firmware update with 4K capability. If the weather is decent, I will try one more time on Sunday, making sure that 4K is enabled. The native resolution still is 1920x1080. The upgrade bumps the image size up to 3840x2160 using Drizzle processing. From the three minutes of internet research I did, you need lots of images to stack to make this meaningful. Since comet exposures are not very long, 3-5 minutes, I don't know if it will make a difference for those. For deep-sky long exposures, maybe it will do something. (BTW, it seems the only competitor to the S50 at the price point of approximately $500 is still the Dwarf 3, although you could also consider ZWO's own S30 for about $100 less.)

This image of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, is slightly better than the one I posted last year on my web site. This one was taken after I switched the setting to 4K, which I figured out was what I wanted to do two hours after the comet set. This is a 34-minute exposure.

It is now possible, with the proper wedge, to use the Seestar in equatorial mode rather than Alt-Az. This enables longer exposures of deep sky objects. I could try my old Meade tripod which has an adjustable wedge. I don't know how complicated the setup procedure is.

Two nights ago, I didn't get the Seestar out in time for the comet, but the TV anchor made a passing remark about the Northern Lights. I set the 6D out with the wide angle lens and figured, if nothing else, I would get star trails. There were a couple images in the middle of the night that showed a hint of the aurora way off to the north, but very difficult to see and not worth posting. So here are the star trails. I'm not going to do anything else with this image so didn't try to edit out the satellite and airplane trails. Exactly eight hours, 930 thirty-second exposures. For those who want to do the math, 930*30/3600 is only 7 hours 44 minutes. There's also the one second the intervalometer needs in between exposures, and yes, that adds up to 16 minutes over eight hours.

Recent trailcam images

I neglected the National Forest cameras all summer and finally got out there. The highlight would have to be a young bear climbing a tree as his mother patrols the ground on July 22. The final shot of the bear sequence is a few minutes later from a different camera on the same tree facing the opposite direction. There's also a bobcat, a moose pair and the usual deer.

I have four cameras spread along a trail from the bridge to the miner's cabin, and a fifth set up on a side trail. It was difficult to put the fifth camera on that trail because there are no well-positioned trees, so I finally just drove a stake into the ground. It is a frequent route followed by a couple of coyotes, as well as rabbits and the local deer.