Monday, December 23, 2024

Ermine

One reason I put up with the crappy image quality from Melted Browning #6 is it still can tell me about something totally unexpected. I have it pointed at my shed on the off chance that a bear or a moose wanders by. Or a white weasel, aka an ermine. There he is at the corner of the shed on Dec. 18. The winter of 2022-23, voles under the snow chewed up my lawn, but it wasn't so bad last winter. Maybe this is why. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance says, "Female ermine are smaller than the male and will use their size to fit perfectly into vole tunnels, the ermine’s preferred prey." I usually don't crop trailcam images, but the ermine is so small that I did it with this one.

In other news, there are four deer, more or less, who wander through the yard. The most recent trailcam images from Browning #11, mounted on a steel post in the middle of the back yard facing northwest, captured them jumping over the fence a couple times. The latter one from Dec. 14 was excessively blurred, but the ones shown here from Dec. 12 had better light.

A fox runs past the camera every few days and usually is severely motion blurred with exposure time of 1/15th of a second, but here he paused long enough for the nighttime camera to get a decent shot. The Browning #11 has two cameras, color for daytime and B&W for night. Unfortunately, the B&W images still suck, but maybe they are better than the older #6, which only has one camera.

When I put #11 in the middle of the yard on the metal post, I was concerned about it swaying back and forth in the wind, and for the most part that has not been a problem. But we had some high winds last week and it registered more than 1,800 false triggers in 36 hours.

Saturday, December 14, 2024

Meteors

The height of the Geminid meteor shower was supposed to be last night, so I made an attempt to get some images. All I managed to prove is that the AC power adapter I recently got for the 6D and 5D works perfectly. I set up the 6D and fired off 735 shots in about 7.5 hours. The exposure time was 35 seconds, which is a bit too long to avoid some trailing if I had gotten any worthwhile images.

One problem is the Moon is the brightest object in the night sky, by far. The most recent star trails I shot were 800 ISO at f/2.8. This image was 100 ISO at f/4, so if I am doing the math right the stars are only 1/16th as bright as they would be under a moonless sky. If there were any meteors, they were lost in the glare.

What you can see in this image besides the moon is Jupiter and Orion to the left.

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Fox and deer

I've had the Browning #11 on the post facing northwest for almost a month. Two questions have been answered: The post does sway in the wind and cause false triggers, but not very often. And the camera will trigger on animals on the other side of the fence. No moose in the past few weeks, but the camera did get quite a few occurences of deer and fox. Melted Browning #6 also got the same critters at its location facing southeast toward the shed.

The newer Browning doesn't freeze night shots. The deer has to be totally still to get a clear image. The fox never stops moving, so all I get is a blur. The running deer during the day shows a shutter speed of 1/861, while the night shots are 1/12. The older Browning actually had less motion blur (shutter speed 1/40), so I need to check the settings to see if I am missing something. (I also need to set AM/PM correctly on #11.) Here are four images from #11 followed by two images from #6.

Mosaic

After travel over the holiday, we returned to clear skies in Montana so I got the Seestar out to try the mosaic function again. It isn't a foolproof process, but I was able to get some results. I shot Andromeda first, getting 61 minutes of exposure time spread over 2 hours and 40 minutes. At that point it was consistently giving me stacking errors, so I switched to the Orion Nebula. For some reason the Seestar did not produce an image on the phone, which gives total exposure time, but after about an hour and a half it also was giving stacking errors. Then I went back to Andromeda and got 81 minutes of exposure time over just under three hours.

The images I edited are the stacked JPGs saved on the Seestar. I run them through Siril just to remove the green cast, and do the rest of the editing in Photoshop. There still was a bit of noise in the corners, but a lot of that was cropped out in these images. The Andromeda image is about equal to what I posted a month ago. The Orion image maybe isn't quite as good as what I posted before, but the previous one wasn't a mosaic. I also shot a few stills of Jupiter. Shown below is a composite with different exposures for the planet and the moons. The planet shows a very slight amount of detail. From left are Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Not great, but better than I can get with a long lens on a DSLR. The final image is from the DSLR, 5D and 500mm lens, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in 2020. The visible moons are Callisto, Io and Europa.

Andromeda mosaic

Orion nebula mosaic

Jupiter and moons

Jupiter, moons and Saturn, 2020