Sky Diary: the blog

On Florida’s Space Coast, we like to say rockets get out of here in a hurry. This GoPro “nightlapse” timelapse makes the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Starlink satellites on April 28, 2021, appear to be REALLY fast. In retrospect, it would’ve been nice if the trees weren’t in the way, but the challenge of launch photography is knowing where the rocket is going to come up, especially if you’re shooting from a new location. Yes, you can sort of figure it out, but it’s still possible to be just a little bit off.

It was a really windy night, so the palm trees were blurred in my photos. The moon was just beyond full, so it showed up nicely in the fisheye photo.

In this picture, I played around with stacking just a few photos. That’s the streak shot here with the nice blue background and really short star trails.

Here’s the photo I shot with my 10.5mm fisheye lens. This is one long exposure – 257 seconds – featuring the launch on one side and the moon on the other. I cropped it a little to get the strong horizontal shape.

 
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted NASA’s Crew-2 to the International Space Station from Kennedy Space Center at 5:49 a.m. EDT on April 23, 2021, with a Crew Dragon capsule. We had a chance to see the launch from the NASA causeway, on the Cape Canaveral side.

The predawn launch was perfectly timed for lovely light effects as the capsule and the booster it shed (which subsequently landed on the drone ship) headed to the horizon in parallel. The contrail left a swirl of noctilucent cloud in the early morning sky.

This is the second crew launched to the ISS aboard a Falcon 9. NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, will spend six months aboard the space station.

There’s also new hardware aboard the capsule, including science experiments.

GoPro timelapse video (in nightlapse mode) and photographs shot with two Nikon cameras are featured in the video. You can see some of the photographs in the gallery below.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

 
 
One thing you can say about this past year is that we’ve learned how to become travelers in our own backyard. Early in our self-imposed lockdown, I decided to get a bird feeder set up.

We have a pretty bird-friendly yard. It’s small but has a lot of cover – or what one might call a miniature Florida jungle – and we don’t use pesticides. So I thought we could create a little bird oasis and get some entertainment to boot.

After months of refinements, adding a second feeder, and endlessly manipulating the setup with arching supports and baffles to keep the rodents from helping themselves, we’ve seen some wonderful little visitors to our backyard.

 

Winter in Florida is always a good time to see birds, and as they migrate up north in the spring, we catch some beauties.

Just in the last two days, I’ve seen more variety than ever — rose-breasted grosbeaks, painted buntings, even a bird new to me — a northern parula. I had to look it up.

Hummingbirds have also been frequent visitors to the flowers around the feeder, and one of my favorite captures was of the moment when a bee flew into a resting hummingbird’s face and the bird told it to buzz off.

 
Maybe the variety of birds isn’t as vast as what one might see at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, but it’s pretty exciting for the backyard.

P.S. Because some have asked, to keep out squirrels and other rodents, we use a Squirrel Buster bird feeder, with a long, arching support hook and a wide baffle like this one. The small, round feeder requires a different, rounded baffle to keep out clever rodents.

Here’s a gallery of some of the wonderful visitors we’ve had in 2021. Roll over an image below to see its caption, and click on any photo below to start a slide show of larger images.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral at 12:34 p.m. today with more Starlink communications satellites aboard. I got a nice view from fairly close, though I used a GoPro to shoot a wide-angle video. It’s fun to see the mullets jumping out of the water as the roar rolls over the Banana River.

Eventually many thousands of Starlink satellites in low-earth orbit will provide internet service, though some worry about the visual pollution they are already creating in the night sky.

 

My neighbors have left some pretty wildflowers to grow for short periods in their front yard, and I hope they leave these for a while longer – because they are making tiny blue butterflies very happy.

If you’re not looking, you might miss these little beauties except for their fluttering flashes of blue. They are typically smaller than an inch across.

What I didn’t realize until I got out the macro lens and really started looking closely is that there were two varieties of tiny blue butterflies enjoying these flowers, which are a type of fleabane – perhaps eastern daisy fleabane? There are several varieties of fleabane native to Florida. The white flowers on these delicate plants are barely bigger than a typical thumb tack. I included a bee photo for scale.

Ceraunus blue butterflies are common throughout Florida, according to the University of Florida. They have a distinctive dark dot ringed by orange on the underside of their wings. The top of the wing is a pretty blue – I only got one of these to open for me for long enough to get shots of this enchanting iridescent blue, and the butterfly appeared to have a damaged wing.

The cassius blue is more cold-sensitive and can’t survive northern Florida winters. It has two beautiful iridescent dark blue “eye” spots on the underside of each wing. Apparently you can tell male from female from the coloring of the tops of the wings, but I didn’t get to see these beauties unfold their wings except in flight, when they were too quick for my camera. However, some had whiter bodies and wings than others, as you can see in the photo gallery below, and I suspect the lighter-colored ones may be the females.

In the past, I’ve seen tiny blue butterflies around my plumbago, too, which are making a comeback after a severe trimming. They can play host to the cassius blue. I’ll be looking even more closely the next time I see them to see which butterfly is paying us a visit.

Roll over an image below to see its caption, and click on any photo below to start a slide show of larger images.

Whew! What a wild, wonderful, windy morning it was on the Indian River Lagoon today! With winds topping 30 mph, there were actually whitecaps on the waves, a rare occurrence around here.

The cool weather was also welcome, as I expect we’ll soon get into the summer heat, with no escape in sight for months.

The brisk weather was somehow soothing, and I shot a little video to capture these lovely conditions, which came in the wake of a cold front. It’s so relaxing to watch as the palm trees sway and the waves move and sparkle. Enjoy.

I was lucky tonight to see a couple of manatees grazing along the edge of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge, Florida, and stopped to shoot a little video. They really lived up to their nickname, “the gentle sea cow.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen them elbowing their way onto the rocks at the water’s edge to get their dinner, as you’ll see in this short video.

These creatures, listed as “vulnerable” because of the extreme pressure put on their population by humans, have had a rough time this year in the lagoon, with high numbers dying. I’m disheartened when I see so many lawns in neighborhoods near the river with signs declaring they’ve been treated with fertilizers and pesticides (and for children and pets not to walk on the treated lawns because they’re toxic). I mean, they’re not hiding it – customers are paying people to dump poison on their yards. All of these chemicals flush right into the lagoon, making manatees, dolphins and turtles sick and leading to the fish kills we occasionally see here.

There are such simple steps we can take to keep our natural wonders like the lagoon beautiful and healthy for us and the wildlife.

Here’s the video.
 

I’ve seen an occasional sun halo here in east-central Florida, and I’ve also seen sun dogs. But I’ve never seen a halo of the complexity I witnessed the afternoon of February 10 in Rockledge. My best shot of the phenomenon was my first, with my phone. I got my “real” camera a little late to capture it when it was at its best. But it was still pretty amazing and lingered for a while.

There are names for all of the arcs you see in the images. The light effects are created when sunlight interacts with ice crystals in the atmosphere. And some of the best ones you’ll see are in cold environments where “diamond dust” ice particles hover lower in the air as well. That’s why I was so surprised to see these pretty decent effects in Florida on a warm day.

The round circle is a 22-degree halo. The bright lights in the ring on either side are sun dogs, or parhelia. Wikipedia helped me identify the other arcs. The upside-down “rainbow” at the top is a circumzenithal arc, seen resting atop a supralateral arc (this is visible as a faint rainbow-type arc in the wider shots). There also seems to be an upper tangent arc kissing the top of the 22-degree halo.

Now I’ll be anxious to see if I can catch this phenomenon again … before I can travel to a colder clime to get a really elaborate demonstration.

It’s been a spectacular few days for rocket launches on Florida’s Space Coast. Friday evening, Nov. 13, 2020, the long-delayed Atlas V finally launched with a spy satellite, and the twilight made for a gorgeous contrail as it headed to orbit. I shot photos from the Cocoa, Florida, waterfront.

Sunday night, Nov. 15, 2020, SpaceX launched its Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard, headed to the International Space Station from Kennedy Space Center. I was lucky to get a spot on the NASA causeway, on the Cape Canaveral side, and got some interesting photographs of the launch. It was hazy and humid, and that humidity was a factor in my hazy streak shot. I decided to embrace the haze, and as I refined the photo in editing, I brought out the color. There were amazing colors in the contrail as the rocket headed to orbit … extraordinary reds and blues … and with some zooming (and later cropping), I caught some wild images. A bigger lens might have been better, but I was still thrilled to capture these psychedelic moments.

This gallery is a mix of both launches. The twilight shots are from ULA’s Atlas V. The darker shots are SpaceX’s launch.

Another Mars rover is on its way to the red planet after launching this morning from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. One of the highlights of my time covering space for Florida Today was visiting one of the first Mars rovers during its processing at the Cape and going to the Jet Propulsion Lab in California to cover the excitement of Spirit’s landing on Mars. I love these science missions … relatively low cost compared with human missions, and the rewards are manifold. I wish Perseverance well on its journey.

I shot these launch photos from the edge of the Indian River Lagoon in Rockledge, Florida. It was a hazy morning, but Florida always offers fresh ways to look at each launch.