I spent part of the morning visiting my old friend, Roy, and shooting feeder birds. The more exotic birds seen, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks and Baltimore Orioles were present but shy.
American Goldfinch
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Bluebird
Brown Thrasher
Northern Cardinal
Here’s a shout out to my friend, Bo Edwards, keeping an eye out for these things. We were able to catch the International Space Station transiting the Moon Sunday night at about 8:30. The ISS was very bright, brighter than some parts of the Moon, so you can follow it as it passed in front of the Moon. It was all over in about a second. See the video, the composite, and the closeup. I rotated the composite so that it would look the way we saw it and how the Moon normally looks. Shot with a Canon R6 paired with a 1500mm FL MCT. Each frame was 1/4000th of a second at ISO 25600.
So, on Wednesday, March 25th, my friend Deepak Kumar reached out and asked “Hey, Jim. You want to get up at 1AM Thursday morning, drive two hours to a dark sky site, shoot the Milky Way for an hour, then drive two hours back before going to work for the day?”. Sure, I said. I used my Canon R6 with a 14mm lens from one of the darkest spots in Arkansas, Tyler Bend Campground on the Buffalo National River.
