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
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.
Either Mama Frog picked a bad location or these little critters fell over the edge, as I found a handful in the big stainless steel bowl Mary uses for spot-watering some of her plantings:
The bowl curves inward over their heads and their feet didn’t seem sticky enough to get them up and out, so I dumped the lot of them into the flower bed. May they live long & prosper!
We found this critter keeping a watchful eye on the construction at Adams Fairacre Farms during our most recent grocery trip:
I think it’s an undocumented alien that entered the US stowed away in a tropical plant, because it was affixed to the array of ceramic pots outside their (open) greenhouse windows:
To the best of my admittedly limited herpetological knowledge, none of our native lizards / geckos / whatever have such a distinctive dorsal frill / fin / ridge. I have no idea how to look the critter up, though.
We left it to seek its own destiny. Unless it’s a mated female (hard to tell with lizards), it’ll have a lonely life.
Perhaps it practices rishratha, which is entirely possible.
This Great Blue Heron caught a bright orange goldfish in the Vassar Farm Pond just before I rode past, spotted the scene, and fumbled my camera out of the underseat bag.
The heron hurked the fish down, with the abrupt right-angle bend in its neck marking the fish’s current location:
A bit of wiggling & jiggling put the meal in the right place and the bird relaxed:
A postprandial flight around the pond apparently settled the fish:
It landed on a snag a few dozen feet from where it started, then proceeded to look regal:
Those things really do look like pterodactyls in flight!
I watched the Canada Goose family paddling around the pond:
A hiker on the trail around the pond brought them to DEFCON 4:
The little ones aren’t triphibans yet, but they know the drill:
Maybe he only does that when Mom’s not watching?
An iridescent ball appeared on the kitchen wall:
Despite the silvery shine under LED lighting, it was a Golden Tortoise Beetle:
The iridescence shows up better with a bit of underexposure:
Transparent armor: who’d’a thunk it?
Mary spotted one in the garden some years ago; I’ve never seen such a thing.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 