Shooting more birds

Selected photos of birds I’ve shot recently with a 600mm Sigma on my 6D, allows you to get quite close without disturbing our avian friends, at least until they are startled by the sound of the camera shutter. Click the kingfisher to open my Flickr gallery or visit the Fluidr version of the page here.

600mm Birds

Watch this video of an alien solar system

There is a star in the constellation of Pegasus that is 129 light years from Earth. It’s a young star, a mere 50 million years old (cf the sun is 4.5 billion years old (ish) This star, HR 8799, has planets, hot planets far bigger than Jupiter and Saturn that swing around it in vast orbits.

Scientists at the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics collected data from this distant solar system over the last few years and Jason Wang at the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) made the images into a “video”. You are looking at another solar system. This warrants an OMG on a cosmic scale. Jennifer Harrison waxed lyrical about this “footage” on twitter earlier so thanks to her for bringing it to my attention.

The orbits are not complete, of course, the scientists have only been watching the system since 2009. A year on the closest planet to the star lasts 40 earth years, the most distant planet takes 400 earth years to do a complete circuit.

OMG.

Where did we get the cappuccino?

I had, without Googling, always assumed that the word cappuccino simply meant “little head” in Italian. Capo being head and the suffix making it a diminutive form. However, my BFF Tim Lihoreau suggested the etymology was more involved, having heard Inky Fool Mark Forsyth discuss Capuchin monks (on The Museum of Curiosity recently) and the colour of their robes and how that gave rise to the name of the beverage. That etymology is mentioned in many places, but I think  it’s partly deceived wisdom.

There has to be some sort of connection, but this sounds contrived, reverse engineered, like those tales of why Brits stick two fingers up rather than flipping the bird and it being about the French amputating English archers’ drawing fingers (as if warring nations didn’t simply slaughter each other rather than keeping disabled prisoners!)

Anyway, paintings of the Capuchin monks in their robes suggest that they were the common or garden dark brown, rather than the beige one might expect of a decent milky froth on a cappuccino.

Etymol Online has this to say about Capuchin:

Capuchin (n.) Look up Capuchin at Dictionary.com 1520s, from Middle French capuchin (16c., Modern French capucin), from Italian cappuccino, diminutive of capuccio "hood," augmentative of cappa (see cap (n.)). Friar of the Order of St. Francis, under the rule of 1528, so called from the pointed hoods on their cloaks. As a type of monkey, 1785, from the shape of the hair on its head, thought to resemble a cowl.

And for cappuccino:

1948, from Italian cappuccino, from Capuchin in reference to the beverage's colour and its supposed resemblance to that of the brown hoods of the Friars Minor Capuchins (see Capuchin).

So, in digging deeper I did a quick search of Capuchin monk hairstyles and found this Alamy stock image of a modern-day Capuchin monk…now…doesn’t the shaved crown of his his look a little like a milk froth sitting on top of a coffee to you? (No, offence Brother).

I must confess his robes are beige in that photo though and given that cappuccino was coined in the 1940s, presumably by a cafe barista cutting corners and costs, it could have any etymology they liked, maybe it’s both little hood and beige robes…and tonsurial haircuts.

Fox and pheasant

We took a bracing and frosty walk with the dog on Sunday morning, ended up walking about 5.5 miles (that was Mrs Sciencebase’s plot, I got 5.7 miles), took us about 2.5 hours but lots of stopping to chat to other dogwalkers and friends along the way and to take photographs.

Within 20 minutes of setting off we’d spotted a distant fox in the field on the west side of Rampton Road. The fox appeared to be snuffling around in the grass, perhaps munching on a few insects and grubs. It didn’t seem to notice the pheasant which ran straight in front of it after the bird heard my distant camera shutter. It wasn’t until the last moments that the fox looked up and seemed, in this snap, to be stalking the bird, but the photo taken a split second later saw the bird running past and the fox going back to its grubbing around. The pheasant coolly headed for the cover of the nearest hedgerow unscathed. Presumably, the fox didn’t fancy the chase.

I took the shot from the roadside verge about 500 metres away but with a short lens fully extended to just 105mm so not a proper big zoom, I’ve cropped it right in and you can see it’s a fox watching a male pheasant, honest.

Further along the road and we turn on to the grassy footpath proper, heading along the drainage ditch (lode) parallel to Rampton Spinney. At the dogleg in the ditch a kingfisher we’ve spotted before flits along the water course and over the bank out of sight. Kingfisher numbers seem to be on the rise, I’ve seen 4 or 5 in recent weeks in different places. Didn’t get a shot of that bird though.

There was a solitary cygnet on the icy lode, we also spotted a snipe (don’t think I’ve seen a snipe in these here parts before) and heard what we imagined was a curlew in the distance (very unlikely here). Further along the lode there lapped lapwings on the wing, fieldfares faring well in the fields, a less than egregious egret and at least one heron lolloping in the air heroically. Further on still, heading towards All Saints Church, there are goldfinches, long-tailed tits, robins, blackbirds, rooks, blackheaded gulls in winter plumage (usual stuff).

We weren’t enraptured by raptors on this walk, not even a kestrel and certainly not the red kites I spotted several years ago along this stretch. There weren’t even the usual buzzards buzzing the rooks.

Next, a pedestrian U-turn back up Twentypence Road and past the church, up the lane past the old buildings that aren’t there any more and then Mrs Sciencebase spots more animals in the distance, not farm animals (lots of sheep grazing locally of late). Muntjac deer, perhaps? Nope, two foxes this time grubbing around and then scrapping or courting (hard to tell at this distance).

More chit-chat with friends heading in the opposite direction as we head up Long Drove and by the time we’re back in the village proper we assume wildlife sightings will drop to zero, but a redwing in a tree at the edge of Coolidge Gardens adds another tick in the mental Eye-Spy-Book-of-Birds.

Paintshop Pro beats Photoshop and Paint.net

Years ago I used Paintshop Pro as a lightweight alternative to Photoshop, then I got turned to Photoshop (I had a legit copy of version 2!) but later abandoned it for other programs such as paint.net. Unfortunately, that application never quite cut the mustard in terms of creating masks nor feathering selections

So, I started to look for an alternative and discovered that PSP had been resurrected and is now sold by Corel as version X9, so I gave that a try and so far does what I need it to do with none of the massive CPU and RAM overhead of Photoshop and it starts within seconds rather than taking a minute…

I found a discount code online and given that they’re also having a sale, I think it came up at fifty quid, which is a fraction of the price of the latest full version of Photoshop. PS purists will scoff and open source purists will also scoff…but hey, horses for courses and who needs a sledgehammer to crack a nut? Oh, and the download came with several freebies, such as brushes and frames, quick photo fix tools and lots of other usable stuff.

Does hotter water freeze faster than cold?

UPDATE: Whether this proves to be right or wrong, my feature was the most well read article on Chemistry Views in 2017.

It sounds like #deceivedwisdom, but there are lots of reputable scientists who believe the Mpemba effect wherein hot water freezes faster than cold water is real. Youtube was replete with videos of people fling pans of boiling water into Canada’s freezing winter air to make clouds of “snow” and their friends with cold water attempting the same and simply getting a puddle in the snow. That effect is probably more to do with rapid evaporation and crystallisation than the Mpemba effect, but it makes for a great show nevertheless.

A couple of years ago, I believe The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) ran a competition to find an explanation for the actual Mpemba effect in which a container of warmer water placed in a freezer seems to become ice faster than a container of cold water. There have been very few validated, reproducible experiments on this surprisingly. And, in a recent Chemistry World, of which I only just got wind, a Cambridge team claims to have shown that there is no effect, it is deceived wisdom.

But…

I was sent a research paper that used calculations and vibrational spectroscopy to show that there are some sixteen different types of hydrogen bond present in water and that the distribution of types changes with temperature. Essentially, there being much tighter H-bonds (despite thermal agitation) in hotter water than cold. It is this distribution that means hotter water can nucleate more rapidly on cooling and form microscopic ice crystals that seed the liquid and allow it to freeze faster. You can read more details in my recent Chemistry Views article on this topic.

Incidentally, the snow-making videos are something of a distraction, this isn’t what Cremer and his team are talking about really, and they probably show rapid evaporation and crystallisation rather than the difference in ice formation caused by temperature difference.

What do you think? Is the Mpemba effect deceived wisdom or can different populations of hydrogen bonds persist and override the simple thermal effects and heat loss processes in water?

UPDATE: Dana Roth at Caltech just pointed to another paper that seems to support the existence of the effect and has a similar explanation re H bonds and nucleation.

What causes a halo around the moon?

There was a gorgeous winter halo around the pre-full moon last night. The near 22° halo is an optical phenomenon occurs as moonlight is refracted by millions of ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. The halo is large with a radius approximately the size of an outstretched hand at arm’s length. As light passes through the 60° apex angle of the hexagonal ice crystals it is refracted twice resulting in deviation angles ranging from 22° to 50°. The angle of minimum deviation is almost 22° (21.84° on average; 21.54° for red light and 22.37° for blue light).

If you look carefully at a winter halo, you can sometimes discern that the inner edge is reddish while the outer edge has a blue hue. My quick photograph does not do the spectacle justice, couldn’t find a tripod to do a proper long exposure with a small aperture, so: aperture f/4, 1/100 second exposure, ISO 16500, 24mm focal length, +5 ev).

Apparently in folklore, although I’d never heard this, such moon rings are supposed to warn of approaching storms. They often appear when there are thin cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, which do appear a few days before large weather fronts, but winter halos also form without any associated weather change. Moreover, they’re actually rather common, more common than big storms. So, you’re probably better off watching for a red sky in the morning or checking how wet your seaweed is.

Facebook knows everything about your photos

Have you ever wondered what Facebook thinks of your photos…here’s a simple trick to find out courtesy of my friend Amit Agarwal’s Digital Inspiration blog.

First, in the Google Chrome browser, open any photograph on the Facebook website and click the thumbnail to view the enlarged version of the image. Next, right-click the image and choose “Inspect” which will open the Chrome Dev Tools.

Take a look at the “alt” for the image tag and you’ll see a description that Facebook added based on what it perceives as the photo’s content. I tried it on a photo of a wet, sunlit swan I posted yesterday and the tag showed up as “Image may contain: bird, outdoor and water”.

Not bad.

Tried it on a more scenic shot of Wimpole hall, with blue skies and lots of grassy foreground. Facebook reckons this is “mountain, sky, grass, outdoor and nature”. It missed the building and it’s not really mountainous there, but close enough. More abstract photos didn’t generate an alt tag, others of birds and outdoors were tagged correctly. Photo of a shop window was tagged as “indoors”. A photo of the moon with an aeroplane flying across its crescent was simply labelled as “night”. Your mileage may vary.