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Great Blue Heron

I spotted a Great Blue Heron flying past my apartment yesterday, coming in low for a landing. Grabbed the camera and found him perched on a rock in the river behind my neighbor's house. I got some pictures of him standing there and hunting for fishes, and then I waited, hoping to get some shots of him taking off. This turned into a standing competition, because he seemed to be quite content basking in the sun where he was. More than an hour later he finally took off, heading upriver. Click the image above for lots more pictures.

A magnificent creature, though I can see how terrifying he would be if you were a fish or a frog. (Zoom in on the head shot above here.)

Mergansers 2025

They're back! I first spotted a momma Merganser with 8 — no, 9 ducklings above the Brassworks dam on May 27. The following week a whole lotta rain turned the river into a swift torrent, and I wondered how the Mergansers were faring. A few days later, I spotted a mom with just 5 youngsters. Is that all that's left of the 9?? Nah, the river is surprisingly safe for youngsters, even in high water or when they get temporarily separated from the family. Later spottings showed that there are two families on the river this year, one with (as it turns out) 10 youngsters and another with 5. Click the picture above for more pictures of the ducklings growing up.

Lunar Eclipse, March 2025

The Earth has a circular shadow extending out behind it in space. Usually you can't see any sign of this shadow, but it becomes visible when the moon passes through it. Here, two exposures during the partial phases of this morning's eclipse show the outline of the shadow. (The moon passed above the center of the shadow in this eclipse, so the shadow is a large circle that extends below the bottom of this picture.)

A much longer exposure during the middle of the eclipse reveals that the dark shadow isn't completely black—it's deep red, and darker towards the center of the shadow. The color is the result of sunlight sneaking around the edge of the Earth, refracted by the Earth's atmosphere and red for the same reason sunsets are red. If you were standing on the moon looking up at the Earth during the eclipse, you would see the "new Earth" as a bright red ring: the horizons of all the dawns & dusks happening on the planet, all seen at once. The top of this eclipsed moon is brighter because from there, near the perimeter of the shadow, the sun is just barely below the edge of the Earth as seen from the moon.

Click the picture above for more photos of the eclipse.

I had planned on setting up a tracking mount and taking a timed series of exposures of the eclipse, but the sky that night was overcast. Spotting the moon through occasional thin patches in the clouds, I couldn't resist snapping a few handheld shots with a telephoto lens . . . then finally gave in, put the camera on a fixed tripod, and sat around waiting for the clouds to thin out enough to quickly take a picture or two. I had a lucky break mid-eclipse and was able to shoot a half-dozen frames with minimal cloud cover. Amazingly, despite the almost completely overcast night, I was able to get the shots I needed to assemble this composite picture. Sometimes, the important thing is just to show up for the gig.

A nearly-total lunar eclipse will be visible from Massachusetts in August 2026, but we won't see another total lunar eclipse until June 2029, when the moon will pass almost directly through the center of the Earth's shadow.

Full disclosure: Though this is an accurate depiction of the Earth's shadow, it's an idealized representation of what's actually seen during an eclipse: it's what you would see if the Earth weren't rotating. Click here to see the longer story: Eclipse Reality.

Moon Shots

A few recent moon pictures: a partial lunar eclipse from last September, the moon and Venus from early January, and the moon occulting Mars from mid-January. Click the image above to see the pictures, and click the picture captions to read the narrative for each shot.

Red-shouldered Hawk

This hawk was spotted on power lines outside a window in the apartment above me. My upstairs neighbor said her cat, who was initially making ooh-I-see-a-bird noises, suddenly started making noises of a different sort. Maybe when the hawk looked him in the eye and mentally licked his chops...

Chalk Art 2024

Twenty screevers gathered in Northampton last Friday for the town’s 14th annual Chalk Art Festival. Click the Halloween cat above (by Gabriela Sepulveda Ortiz) to see the artists at work and their finished creations.