Tag: Wildlife

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.

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.