This is a preserved egg from the Great Auk, now extinct.
The last known living egg was smashed by Ketill Ketilsson on June 3rd, 1844 as he helped his friends Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson kill the parents.
They were valuable, you see. Due to their rarity.
Aaah!
There’s a spider in your screen!
Get it out! Get it out!
Scorpions are chronically upset because everyone they play with picks rock, not paper.
In infrared, duckweed is white* and ducks are invisible**.
* Well, the sensor interprets it as “white”. Colours, even white, are tricky when you’re talking about non-visible light.
**Not really.
It’s like some tripped and spilled their bucket of buildings
Mountains usually stay put because they’re very sensitive and don’t want to destroy all the neat stuff we’ve built. They’ll wait until our bedtime and then sweep it all up when we’re not paying attention.
Ten internet points to the person that first finds this on Google Earth.
I saw a documentary that suggested that they used a light acid to dissolve the soft rock away from a fossil like this, but I never understood how they figured out the fossil was in there in the first place.
Cloud computing sounds cool, but you have to remember that clouds are one small part of the entire water cycle.
Remember to put bounds on your fractal generation scripts to prevent data leaks.
Sometimes farmers get tired of doing a large-scale jigsaw and just slamming the pieces in with a mallet.
Since ultraviolet light doesn’t map to visual colours, sometimes I play with band separation to figure out what look I want. In general, the camera picks up UV light as red, orange, purple, and magenta, with two primary bands falling either into orange/purple or red/magenta. I can then use colour shifting to move them around a bit, and get this sort of blue. I think it looks nice.
Yep. This is what dandelions look like in ultraviolet.
A lot of yellow flowers have similar patterning. It helps the bees know where to go.
(Bees aren’t that bright.)
I picked up an ultraviolet camera last year, but it wasn’t until a month or two back that I got the lens I needed with it. I had hoped that I could leverage older lenses with this camera and, as it turned out, the answer was “not really”. They do work, but they don’t have full transmission across all UV bands, so it wasn’t clear if I was getting everything I really wanted.
I still need to find a way to generate full spectrum UV light (the sun is a good source, I think, but I need a flouride spectrum or something to spread out the colours) so I can test the lenses I have to see how close they really are. I also have concerns that the camera itself may not be detected everything I want it to, but testing that is much harder as it means I have to convert several cameras so I can do side-by-side testing.
For now, enjoy the weirdness that is less than ideally scientific (non-fluorescent) UV photography.
The word “plumose” comes from the Latin: “pluma” meaning down or “plumosus” meaning full of down or feathers. Further exploration suggests that it means something like “having multiple filaments coming off one axis, like a feather”. This gets more interesting when you look at the historical examples: “a plumose leaf”, “plumose tentacles”, or as in this example “plumose anemone”.
Basically, “plumose” means “feathery but not, you know, having anything to do with actual feathers”
This is fine, right?
I mean, it’s clearly not a real spider, so no one out there should have a problem with this photo, right?
The Phoenix zoo is pretty at night.
Ever notice how some types of honey are lighter than others?
A fisheye lens can turn even the most unlikely subject into a snow globe.
Every winter, the Phoenix Zoo does a “ZooLights” event, where people come after dark to admire the lights. This is, traditionally, something that is difficult to photograph, but my new camera does better in low light and I happened to have a “sparkle” filter in my bag, so I figured I’d see how it worked.
I like it.
The Huachuca water umbel is a plant that looks like grass, but isn’t grass. It’s a water plant that needs flooding to propagate and survive. It’s an Arizona native … where flooding is pretty rare now that humans consume the water as fast as they can get it.
Of particular interest is the approximately seven meter run that you see here. This is the largest habitat for this plant in the world.
That’s right, the largest, healthiest stretch of this plant is at the Phoenix Zoo, in a non-public area.
Zoos don’t save only the animal species.