Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Northern Lights II

 Added more from 3/19!  Best show yet, and probably the last from this solar storm.
Tim

A couple more from tonight (3/18).  Really awesome show tonight, perfect conditions, even got some shooting stars (they show up as straight lines)!
Enjoy,
Tim







MORE FROM THE NIGHT OF 3/19/2015:














 



53 comments:

  1. ugh photographic ENVY, Tim! These are gorgeous! #1 - lovely! #3 is especially fun with the shooting stars! *looks in the EXIF data to see settings :D* I've never lived anywhere where astrophotography was really fun (cities - bah) - I love shots like these :)

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    1. Did you notice in pic 3, there are two obvious asteroids within the aurora area, but something else moving in an opposite direction off to the right...Satellite?

      And did you notice the Big Dipper in pic 2? That's what's on the Alaska State Flag.

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    2. Ha - the satellite I did notice! It always makes me feel like I'm living in the future if I can catch a glimpse of an object *in orbit* that we tossed up there. The fact that you can see them if you stare at the sky for even a few minutes has never dimmed the fascination for me :D

      IT COULD BE THE ENTERPRISE UP THERE IN ORBIT, I MEAN C'MON!

      I missed the dipper though! (wide lens threw me - making constellations *small*!)

      Do you follow APOD? I'm obsessed with beautiful space photos - but they also put up fantastic aurora photos as well. This one was shot a year ago in Iceland - take a look, so beautiful! If you mouse-over the pic, the constellations reflected in the water are outlined for identification. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150310.html

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    3. Gorgeous photos Tim. And love Ast. Pic of the Day, Terra. Have just bookmarked it.

      I regularly take a quick look at http://spaceweather.com/
      They often have photos of auroras sent in by people around the world.
      Yesterday's was super purple
      http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=18&month=03&year=2015

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    4. Apparently auroras were visible even in northern NSW in Australia over the last few days. But I'm just a bit further North.

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    5. @Tim
      Can you see them moving? And do they visibly shimmer? And what's the shutter speed on the camera do you know?

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    6. They move a lot. It reminds me of sheets hanging on a clothes line on a windy day, or a curtain blowing around. I was playing with shutter speed between 5 and 20 seconds. Too low and you get a really dark picture, too high and it's blurred out.

      If you look on YouTube, you'll find some videos of the lights, but they usually don't do them justice. There are some cool time-lapse pictures strung together to make it look like a video, with much better effect.

      Still, nothing beats seeing them in person.

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    7. Now I want to see them in person even more Tim. I thought they might be static. Beautiful still but ... kind of deceased. Clothes on the line on a stlll day are a bit too static.But when the wind is blowing I often lie underneath and watch them dance
      Time lapse photography of clouds is good too. In fact time lapse ;photography of anything that only moves imperceptibly. Flowers opening People growing up....,

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  2. I hope you haven't gotten spoiled seeing all those stars. At first, I though I had dust or something on my screen. We never see stars like that here.

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    1. Well, in just a few weeks, there will be no more stars, or darkness, or Northern Lights. Usually when the Northern Lights are out, it's so cold I don't want to go outside. Last night it was like 20 (F) (above zero). I walked about 1/2 mile down the river to get away from all the house lights. You can see in the first set, I was close to home and our lights kind of ruined the pictures.

      It was kind of scary last night standing on the river, you could hear water running under the ice and gurgling up somewhere close by where I was standing. That would quite suck to fall through the ice! But just imagine the "CoolFatBurner" effect, lol.

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  3. Quite a tease Tim. We were promised some last week, but I guess we're outside the southern limits in the Quinte. James

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  4. In your first pix you caught a 'rainbow aurora'. Very beautiful.

    Tonight (Mar 20th) is suppose to have a supermoon.

    Nicole

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  5. Wow! Gives me goosebumps. There is just something electromagnetic that happens even just seeing pictures like this. Like a reflex.

    The Brits got a full solar eclipse today.

    First day of spring today. About time.....yessss.

    That's the thing about living near the equator, there were no changes except rainy or not rainy. I missed the seasons with the changes in day/night length. Except now that I'm older, I'd appreciate more sun during winter. And daylight savings time is a bummer. Here we are, seeing the sun at 7 a.m. and then BOOM! Back to the darkness. It's crap.

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  6. Holy Moly Tim you really must have been feeling that! Just beautiful.

    Gabriella, my issue is *too* much sun in winter. All this snow + sun = spots in front of my eyes on a regular basis just from glancing out my window. I am so. done. with. this.

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    1. Cucumber, I take lutein. Natural eyeball sunscreen.

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    2. I'll keep that in mind Gab, thanks. The eyes recover pretty quick but then I get hit again, pretty awful. Lost a lot of our snow today too, yay!

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    3. I didn't even see my first snow till I was 35.

      Lutein sure, and astaxanthin, Which you can get by eating lots of sockeye salmon, or supplements Lutein is particularly good for eye health, but astaxanthin is uniquely powerful - not just for eyes.

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    4. Oh how interesting - I've been on a salmon eating streak, craving it like mad and eating it for breakfast the last few mornings. (salmon rolled in romaine lettuce leaves with pickled ginger nom nom nom)

      And I see a good source of lutein is quality eggs - we normally get excellent eggs from a friend but they're currently not laying because winter. Hmm.

      Thanks guys!

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    5. I have to be very careful with my eyes because I have a condition that puts me at risk for macular degeneration. So I try to read as much as I can,
      Egg yolks are actually only moderate sources of lutein.
      But Kale has very high levels. Also marigolds.

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    6. I live in a rural area and this time of year it's a food desert and we're desperately low on greens. Our eggs may have been the only source I had of lutein! Another few weeks I'll be up to my neck in them both. Marigold you say? As in calendula?

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    7. I just take the stuff that Costco sells. Made by Webber (may have spelled that wrong.) 25 mg.

      When egg yolks are dark orange they contain more lutein. Just the ones in North America, unless the chickens are outside really eating what chickens should, the yolks are too light. I laugh sometimes that if one day all of a sudden the eggs in the supermarket would have the same colour yolks as the ones in Japan, people would freak out and take them back. People here don't know what good eggs look like. Tim and I have had this discussion, illustrations attached.

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    8. The eggs we get are the real thing. All different sizes and deep orange yolks that stand up high. The hens get weeds from the garden and plenty of bugs and I usually eat 2 of those beautiful eggs a day. I feel so deprived without them! When we have to buy store eggs we weep/laugh. Stupid winter.

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    9. Wild, it's a disgrace. Boggles the mind but people in North America don't know what real food looks or tastes like anymore. Most of the food is so bland, you may as well be eating paper towels with wallpaper paste.

      She says after making a chicken soup wherein two scotch bonnet peppers exploded..............ouch. I think I accidentally mashed them with the soup ladle. Shoulda took 'em out first. Now have evil chicken broth.

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    10. @Gabriella,
      Wallpaper paste is made with dextrin, usually potato. So if you ate in raw, it might not be so bad And the paper towels are cellulose.
      Both excellent fibers.
      Actually, I think the biggest crime with eggs is the conditions battery chickens are forced to endure. And if you're poor, and you live in the city,
      it's all you can afford. Battery chicken eggs can be made to look and taste as good as the free range eggs from happy chickens - with the right food
      Still miserable chickens though. I'd rather eat an ugly low nutrition egg from a happy chicken than a healthy egg from a cruelly housed one. And make up the difference by eating weeds and insects.
      There's so much greenwashing in the world isn't there?

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    11. @Stuart - see now, that's the thing. I've been poor, I know how damn hard it is to eat well, let alone feed children properly. Those of us who cruise the health blogs may not realize access to good food is *paramount*, if you can't afford good food you sure as hell can't afford supplements. That's the most important reason I push the edible and medicinal weeds. Free and of higher value than most foods.

      Gabriella - Oh no!!

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    12. Did you guys know that when a chicken lays an egg, it comes out covered in "bloom." This bloom quickly dries and seals the egg from bacteria and moisture loss.

      Store bought eggs are washed and sanitized, removing the natural bloom.

      I've kept a small flock of chickens for the past 10 years. Love having them around. In the summer, they just hang out and eat mosquitoes, yellow-jackets, spiders and anything else dumb enough to get near them, lol. They also get a big armload of garden scraps or grass clippings every day in the summer.

      In the winter, they get stuck eating commercial chicken food supplemented with sunflower seeds and kitchen scraps.

      The yolks are always better than any store bought eggs, and shells so hard you have to really whack them to crack them.

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    13. @wildcucumber
      And real dirt, not probiotic pills, don't forget that. It's up there in lights with the free weeds don't you think?
      Apparently (and I wasn't even aware of this) calendula officianalis is sometimes called marigold, but common marigold (and the one that is the most concentrated whole food source of lutein on the planet) is from the genus Tagetes.
      Here's the wiki entry
      I seem to remember that common marigold roots produce a chemical that is toxic to nematodes So organic gardeners love it.

      Tim,
      Commercial eggs here can be brushed but not washed to preserve the bloom.

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    14. Actually wild, I was wrong. Calendula does contain a lot of lutein too I haven't found which is higher yet. What I have noticed is that since I've been taking lutein, it's much harder to get sunburnt.

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    15. Wildcucumber,
      This is the last. Promise

      The post is fascinating, but the very last commenter ( Julianne Spendlove) clears it up somewhat about the lutein factor in both French marigold (tagetes) and pot marigold (calendula officinalis)

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    16. Since everyone is in nerd mode, let me contribute: Brown eggs are brown from the blood of the chicken as the egg is laid. The brown can be scraped off of a fresh laid egg but after it dries, no. If you look inside the shell of a brown egg, the shell is white.

      However, blue, green and other coloured chicken eggs are coloured inside the shell as well.

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    17. Woah, so many interesting things said here..

      Gabi - one of my friends' hens lays eggs that are brown with a slightly purple hue! Those are my favs just cause they are so purty.

      Tim - our pal never washes the eggs, just a bit of a wipe if needed. Interesting how commercial eggs are more likely to make us sick in the interests of "cleanliness!"

      Stuart - ah good old dirt of course. Grimy children are healthy children! Thanks for the links on marigolds, I'll have a look. I can't abide the tagetes, just hate the smell. Also they're so foreign to our area they somehow seem to draw bad bugs in. We all have our prejudices! I grow calendula, it plays nicely in the garden and it sure can be a gorgeous deep yellow/orange, like good egg yolks. Interesting about the lutein and sunburn. Factoid - commercial, "standardized" St Johnswort in pills causes photosensitivity but using the *whole* plant infused in oil is a good sunscreen or aftercare for a burn. It too has bright yellow flowers - they exude a juice that is blood red.

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    18. Wild, one of my faves is Seabuckthorn. Good for sunburn. I use a seabuckthorn based moisturizer on my face but Aubrey's isn't making it anymore and the other uber expensive ones become rancid or at least they smell rancid.

      A lot of the eggs here that are not your bog standard factory farmed come from Quebec. They have the QC on the stamp. The supermarket close by sells the blue, bluegreen and some super dark mahogany brown eggs. I tried them all and have settled for free run duck eggs from the Niagara region. Just visualizing free running ducks cracks me up. The jogging chicken eggs didn't taste any different or look any different than bog standard. In fact the Braeburn factory farmed eggs had more flavour.

      Oh well. Just staying with the duckie eggs. They have huge variations in size and right now they are all quite small compared to what was being sold during the summer. Those were so massive, they didn't really fit in the egg carton. For whatever reason, the duck eggs have considerably more flavour than the chicken eggs. Plus really huge plumpy yolks.

      Finding good eggs is difficult. The $7 a dozen 'pastured' eggs taste 'pasteured'.....Makes me laugh the picture on the box with green grass and happy chickens when in the winter there ain't no grass. Obviously they are kept indoors under timed lighting or else they wouldn't be laying anything just like your friend's chickens. 'Consumers' are so gullible.

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    19. Wild, I'll agree that grimy children are fine. But as a formerly grimy child, the pinworms were unforgettable.

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    20. Go look at the last picture above, I just took a pic of the eggs my chickens laid this past week. 5 chickens, I get 3-5 eggs per day. All the same breed (Jersey Giants) and quite a range of color (or colour for some of you).

      They same chickens always lay the same color of eggs, so not sure how that fits in with the "bloody butt" theory of egg colour, lol. But, yes, the brown can be polished off to some extent and the insides are white.

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    21. Tim, you show off! Chicken egg grandstander!!

      The brown is from heme. Somehow this stuff leaks through the membrane of the passage (oviduct) as the eggs move downward. Clearly there is variation in how much is secreted/excreted per chicken per egg. You'd need to keep track but it's only possible if the same hen lays in the same place. Maybe if you label the hens with magic marker, you'd be able to tell which one does what? I have no idea. Never been a chicken farmer.

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    22. Okay, so let's say you have good colour vision: put all the eggs of same colour intensity together and I think you've got 4 - 5 eggs (roughly) per each chicken. So even though all of your hens are the same breed, they possibly consistently lay eggs the same degree of brown each time. Their diets are not different so it's not the food. Could be difference due to variation in genetic expression for whatever epigenetic reason this happens.

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    23. haha, yes, you get to know your chickens very well. An not just color of eggs, but shape...notice some are more conical than others, some fatter. Yes, must be genetics.

      I raised a flock of Aracaunas, often called "Easter Eggers". The holy grail is a true, blue egg...very rare when you get a chicken that lays them, mostly green, olive, or brown. If you get one that ends up laying blue eggs, it is a very valuable chicken and if you own (or rent, lol) a rooster with blue egg genes you can make good money selling the fertilzed eggs and chicks to fanciers of this type of chicken. But even mating a blue-egg laying hen to a blue egg derived rooster will only result in a small portion of chickens that lay blue eggs,

      All I know, is those stupid Easter Eggers were very temperamental, did not lay well, and made great soup!

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    24. @ Gabriella
      Yes, we want the benefits of the full spectrum SBO 'grime' but not the parasites that go with it. I actually asked this in an earlier comment thread but nobody picked up on it. Do you know what effect naturopathic or pharmaceutical antiparasitcs have on gut flora.
      Antibiotics lay waste to gut flora, but do parasitics?
      Maybe we should make sure our kids stay grimy, and just worm them regularly.

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    25. @ Gabriella - I want to hear your take on this too! Or Gemma, do you know? Anyone? What's the deal on castor oil internally, it's generally taken after pumpkin seed for derworming, yes?

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    26. Stuart, which anti-parasitics? Ones for things like protozoans, like amoeba, giardia, malaria etc. or anti-helminithics, which are also parasites.

      Parasites is a big subject. I have a gorgeous book at home called Parasitology and there's an awful lot of parasites.

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    27. Parasitology is a moving target. I have a previous edition of this book.... seems they are publishing a new edition every other year.
      http://www.amazon.ca/Foundations-Parasitology-Larry-Roberts/dp/0073524190/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427145840&sr=8-1&keywords=Foundations+of+Parasitology

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    28. I was referring to the ones you buy at the drugstore to eliminate the pinworns etc that you get from your pets and soil.

      What do those antiparasitics do to gut flora?

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    29. Antihelminthics don't affect bacteria or us. Different metabolism in worms. There are some helminthics that have side effects on us but they aren't antibacterial.

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    30. Some antihelminthics do have adverse side effect in humans but not on batcteria. They lack the structures by which the antihelinthics do their thing. For any given medication you need to check individual side effects. They are quite different from one drug to the next.

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    31. Thanks Gabriella.
      Now that I think about it, insecticides don't kill bacteria either, and I suppose worms aren't that far off insects physiologically.Whereas bacteria are.
      Worms are a huge problem with livestock now. Most of the common worms are resistant to the available anthelmintics. I started only worming my goats once a year. And gave them a lot of seaweed.

      Do you (or wild if you are reading this) know whether black walnut hulls are actually an effective anthelmintic ? I remember there was some celebrated naturopath (Hulda Clark I think) who basically said that most human disease was caused by liver flukes and should be taking black walnut hulls. But she had developed some weird electrical device to diagnose liver fluke infestation, so I just switched off.

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    32. Stuart - I have zero experience with parasites but thanks to your original query I'm starting to. I do know that many of the plants I use are purported to keep them at bay. Goats you say? I ran across this in my travels..

      http://www.wellsphere.com/pregnancy-fertility-article/herbs-that-counter-worms-by-susun-weed/1178491

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    33. Thanks Wild,
      Cronewort. Excellent. I'd never heard of it. I had heard of Susun Weed though. I loved her no nonsense review of the other herbal anthelmintics. And it's hard to argue with a 30 year success record with the Cronewort. Goats are SO cute aren't they? Especially those British Alpines. Do you know that when one is born the amniotic sac is intact? So the newborn kid is in a flexible transparent 'goat fish bowl' until the doe reaches down and bites the sac to break the waters.

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    34. Weed is one cool woman - very "take no prisoners", a bit too abrasive for some. She has a few more articles out there in goat world I think. This is the woman I've learned the most from about people herbs, I'd say she's likely trustworthy about goats, she certainly loves hers dearly. They sure are cute, tis true. I love their bizzaro eyes.

      Don't you love how threads wander on this blog?

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  7. We are in northern Illinois. My teen raised two flocks of chickens in our urban backyard. It was fun, but stinky. We had to use a light to keep them laying throughout the winter.

    Michelle

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  8. Thanks for the reminder about blue eggs, Tim. I had wondered why a local egg farmer sells blue eggs for such high prices. The blue color comes from biliverdin, which may be helpful with heterocyclic amines, oxidants, asthma, cancer, and HIV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biliverdin Fascinating.

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    1. Phil, if you eat the shells? Are the contents any different than other eggs?

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    2. I suppose you do have to eat the shells, right? I wonder if the people who buy them do that. Enough people buy blue eggs that the farmer emphasizes that they are blue eggs.

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