Ipernity Nos 2001-4000

As good as dusk for the warm light it gives us

As good as dusk for the warm light it gives us

As good as dusk for the warm light it gives us

As good as dusk for the warm light it gives us

There is a free downloadable program called Startrails. You need a tripod,a camera capable of taking long exposures (five minutes +) and to know where the North Star is! You take a series of images and then load them up into the Startrails software, which stacks them and produces what you see here. Obviously if I had taken more than three shots the concentric circles would have been uninterrupted, but I wasn't planning on staying out for several hours when it was just above freezing!

The constant calls of Long-tailed Tits are to help the flock stay together. If one bird gets separated from the rest of the flock, the others will double-back to 'rescue' it. This means that if you can imitate their calls you can attract a flock to within a few feet of you and it also explains why ringers sometimes find that a mist-net full of Long-tailed Tits often contains birds which have entered from both directions. This apparent 'care' for the well-being of other members of the flock is almost certainly related to the fact that many flocks are in fact family parties of closely-related individuals.(This description is courtesy of the DVD-ROM Guide to British Birds)

Courtyard flowers from this morning

Watching a documentary last night about Beijing's pollution levels being so bad that the Chinese government were becoming apprehensive about its triggering mass demonstrations, made me realise once more how fortunate we are to live in such pollution-free surroundings - here at least, if not everywhere in the UK...

We have a bit of a ham actor here...

Orion on the right, and Castor and Pollux, and Jupiter.

The Big Dipper