Alternative Blog Post Title: Everything is Bigger in Texas - Excluding Bird Lists
Nerdy for Birdy
Birding, Biking, Kayaking and Nature loving in Windsor Essex County in Ontario Canada
Saturday, March 18, 2023
Birding & Butterfly Watching in Houston Texas - Mid March 2023
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Conjunction of Venus & Jupiter (March 1st) + Woodcocks
Sunday, February 26, 2023
Conjunction of Venus & Jupiter + Early Woodcock?
Back on Feb 19th, I was out on my back porch looking at the sky at about 6:30-6:45 and I heard my first-of-year peent of an american woodcock! Even today (feb 26th), others have seen some in Windsor along with Eastern Phoebes. Spring is on its way.
On Wed March 1st, there will be a conjunction of the two brightest "stars" (planets) in the sky (after the moon of course)- Venus and Jupiter! The weather in Windsor predicts clouds for Wednesday :-( .... I had captured the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn a year or two ago - that can be found here: https://dwaynejava.blogspot.com/2020/12/winter-solstice-2020-conjunction-of.html .These two planets (Venus and Jupiter) will be close all week though ---- easily seen above the western horizon after dusk.
Good birding and astronomizing!
Dwayne
Monday, February 20, 2023
Bird Watching with a Cell-phone? Samsung S23 Ultra is like having a telephoto lens in your pocket. + FOY Am. Woodcock
This weekend, I had picked up a new phone - its a Samsung S23 Ultra. Its a Samsung "flagship" phone - which I have never really owned --- I had the mid-range Samsung A series phones. The reason I chose this phone is because I heard the cameras that its sports are pretty amazing. Of course, an SLR camera can be lugged around, and if you have several thousand dollars, you can buy a wide angle lens, regular zoom and telephoto lenses.
It is capable of wide-angle shots to capture a nice landscape scene, a regular zoom with an ultra fast F1.8 aperture to have nice bokeh behind the subjects you are photographing, and a periscope style 30x optical zoom with up to a 100x "superzoom" for still photos. In video, I think you are limited to 20 or 30x zooming.
So after Church on Sunday morning , I pointed my cell phone up at the top of the bridge to see how good the zoom was,,, and I noticed a peregrine falcon sitting up there. I was about 400m from the bridge, plus the height of the towers might be 100m up --- so this raptor might have been 0.5km from me!
This video shows the wide angle to 30x zoom. It does not go higher than 30x for video.
See another demo here ... (cant embed!)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OTxKF1v75Pc
This cell phone also has some pretty amazing technology --- which includes astrophotography. Incredibly, it can do long exposure sky scenes without the use of a mechanical skytracker. It uses software to to counter act the star trailing effect from the rotation of the earth. So, you could take a 10 minute exposure of the milky way, with out any blur effect ... I can't wait to try this out!