The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Other creatures in our world
It’s the season for large insects, but this Praying Mantis came as a surprise:
Mary spotted it on the outside of the window screen in the front bathroom. We watched it for ten minutes as it strolled around the screen, all the while keeping at least one compound eye aimed at us.
If humans were half as tall, those things would be terrifying!
This being caterpillar season, we put a mystery egg mass on a Swiss Chard leaf into a small container:
I think the darker egg was a dud, because two days later they all hatched and ate their egg cases, leaving that one behind:
Mary deported them to the trash, put two on a leaf in an aquarium on the kitchen table, and, eight days later:
They’ve been chowing down on spare garden greenery; unlike Monarchs, they eat what’s set before them.
One has dark “fur”:
The second is lighter:
A third caterpillar escaped the trash can apocalypse and also resides in the aquarium, albeit stunted by its ordeal:
They’re too bristly to be Wooly Bears. I’m sure they’ll turn into nondescript brown moths.
Monarch butterfly eggs occur in onesie-twosies on each milkweed plant, but Tussock Moths carpet-bomb the leaves with eggs that hatch pretty much all at once:
With a population density like that, the plant doesn’t stand a chance:
A few hours later, they were gone and so were the leaves! Presumably, they’re traveling across the ground to the adjacent milkweed plants; one or two may find our patio.
Despite all the egg-laying we saw, we haven’t seen any Monarch caterpillars out there.
In the normal course of events, this critter would become an undistinguished brown moth:
Right now, it’s a two-day-old cross-striped cabbageworm. Its kin are voracious consumers of Brassicacae out in the garden and Mary’s raising it as a show-n-tell exhibit for her Master Gardener compadres; she advised it to not start any long novels.
Taken hand-held with the Pixel XL through a clip-on 10x macro lens.
The Monarch Butterfly egg produced a teeny caterpillar:
Each time it molts, it eats all of its skin except for the transparent cap over the first body segment:
If the rest of the caterpillar were behind the windshield, it’d be feet-upward with its “face” at the top.
The picture comes from a focus-stacked set of microscope images captured with VLC; I turned the positioner’s elevation knob the smallest possible amount between each of 16 images along the 1 mm (-ish) height of the capsule. This magic incantation applies more weight to high-contrast and high-entropy regions:
align_image_stack -C -a monarch vlcsnap-2017-08-09-18h4* enfuse --contrast-weight=0.8 --entropy-weight=0.8 -o Monarch_Windshield.jpg monarch00* # empty line to reveal underscores in previous line
That came out pretty well.
The main cicada season has only begun, so these two may have emerged slightly too early:
They’re “ordinary” cicadas, not periodical cicadas, which certainly matters more to them than us.
They’re completely harmless, but definitely don’t look it:
Their topside armor would look great on a robot:
Found ’em dead on the driveway, alas.
We watched a female Monarch Butterfly lay eggs on the stand of milkweed behind the house. She also found a lone plant in the vegetable garden that’s now standing in a vase on the kitchen table where we can keep an eye on the proceedings.
So far, so good:
I never knew Monarch eggs were so elaborate!
Captured with the VGA-resolution USB camera atop the zoom microscope, with VLC applying automagic gamma and level adjustment.
Focus-stacking the three best images helps the ribs toward the leaf, but not by much:
After picking out the images, all of which bear VLC’s auto-generated names like vlcsnap-2017-07-29-09h26m25s720.png, stack them thusly:
align_image_stack -C -a milkweed *png enfuse -o Monarch.jpg milkweed000*
Tinkering with the options might improve things, but … maybe next time.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 