On the evening of September 16th, 2021, Jupiter's four Galilean moons, Calysto, Io, Ganymede, and Europa, formed a line on either side of Jupiter. The following night, their alignment had changed dramatically. These two videos show the alignment on both nights along with super zoomed veiws of the moon as it swept through my camera's view. Despite the clear night skies, the atmospherics cause the moon and planets to waver. The camera continually attempts to autofocus but it's a never ending battle as you will see in the moon video portions.
Click each link to watch or download the video for that night. The video for the 17th is much shorter than the one for the 16th. 16 Sept 2021, 17 Sept 2021

September 4th found us wandering around the Columbus zoo on a beautiful day to be outside. After six hours of hard pavements, a couple miles of walking, and many amazing animals, we headed home for a quick supper and an very early bedtime! I slept for almost 10 hours!
The slideshow presents a few of the more interesting characters from the day's adventure including a young giraffe, ostriches, greater Kudu, wildebeast, cheetahs, polar bears, a golden plover and eagle from the aviary, and several reptiles, from the reptile house, and a couple of fish from the aquarium. There were many more of each, but this sampling should be enough to whet your appetite for a visit to the zoo yourself. SLIDESHOW LINK.

The 2021 Dayton Airshow featured the Air Force Thunderbirds along with a variety of stunt pilots and demonstration teams. The entire weekendw as dark and cloudy with intermittent rain. Many of the F-18 Superhornet shots show the condensation streaming off the wings and body of the fighter aircraft. At times the moisture in the air was so thick the planes were completely obscured from our sight even at fairly low altitudes. None of the aircraft performed any high-altitude maneuvers. We wouldn't have been able to see them anyway. 2021 Airshow Slideshow

Vandalia, Ohio fireworks on the night of July 3rd, 2021. Long exposure firework images. slideshow

Cedar Bog, near Urbana, Ohio, is home to many insects and birds. Last year I photographed North America's smallest dragonfly, the elfin skimmer, but only saw the male. Today I saw only the females. slideshow

I found I had several photos from the past month on my Nikon's storage card so here's a little catch-up slideshow with dragonflies and a blue grosbeak from today, June 26th, 2021. slideshow

Rather than posting a bunch of images for June and making this page scroll endlessly, I decided to simply include a link to a slide show you can navigate using the little arrow buttons at the base of the page. Just click this link to open the page of thumbnail images and then click any thumbnail to open the larger image and begin navigating the large images using the arrows. Open Slideshow

The warbler migration really began in earnest this weekend. The following photos were taken Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening in two local parks. The Baltimore Oriole was a backyard bird. First shot is a yellow-throated vireo.

Later Saturday afternoon, on my return to the same park, a few more warblers made their appearances but mostly within the same 15-20 minutes. The other two hours were rather quiet. This black and white warbler was very busy hunting bugs.

Northern Parulas tended to be among the most plentiful "exotic" birds but they mostly remained very far up in the tree tops. As with all the warblers, they were constantly on the move looking for bugs to eat.

I'm afraid we were here first. You'll have to come back later. This disappointed blue heron flew by several times hoping we were gone so he could drop into one of his favorite fishing holes.

Even more plentiful than the northern parulas were the palm warblers. They were everywhere Saturday evening in large numbers.

While I could hear several of these yellow-throated warblers, only this one dropped in close enough for a shot. Most remained far up in the trees. After a few loud camera clicks, this one thought better of its lower perch and headed up into the trees.

A favorite backyard bird, the baltimore oriole loves grape jelly, oranges, and hummingbird food. Mary's grape jelly feeder did the trick this year.

Part of the spring migration inludes these rather noisy great-crested flycatchers. They sound like stressed out frogs! If they weren't so noisy, I would likely never find them.

Indigo buntings have arrived as well. Unfortunately, the gray sky doesn't provide much of a background for this brilliant "indigo" bird.

And now for my favorite series of photos from the entire weekend. Every year the prairie warbler shows up in the same park, in the same meadow, and in the same trees. This tiny bird has quite a personality and really enjoys singing.

Late Sunday evening, I caught site of this Nashville warbler when a gold finch kept chasing it away from the tree the goldfinch apparently thought belonged to it.

As the weather improves, the butterflies and migratory birds are making their way into our neighborhoods. A couple of evening outings at Englewood Metropark provided some long-awaited photo opportunities. Here are a few of them.

Even this male bluebird didn't seem to mind my presence. He seemed more interested in watching for bugs than worrying about my camera's clicking away.

A large number of giant Darner dragonflies appeared over the meadow and flew continuously back and forth overhead. This one seemed to tire out and came down for a brief rest. Thank you! That was very nice of you. Not bad from 20 feet distance.

Yellow-throated warblers are among the earliest arrivals in the spring migration. That yellow is brilliant and is easily spotted. Their frequent calling also helps me find them. This one was bathing in a small run-off stream and then popping up into nearby trees to shake off.

The tiny northern parula is one of my favorite warblers. These tiny, colorful birds tend to hang out high in the tops of the trees. Once in a while you'll find them curiously down low in bushes, but that is a rarity.

I thought I heard a prairie warble while watching the above Northern Parula. Sure enough, a few moments later, the prairie warbler made his appearance.

We had a double rainbow on April 9th. The outer rainbow was never complete from our perspective but was still neat to see.

The baby great-horned owls, at Wegerczyn, kept a close eye on the photographers gathered below. We must not have been too interesting as the owlets returned to their afternoon nap within a couple minutes.

The next couple of shots are from our rocky walk at Middlecreek. The quality isn't so bad considering how dark it was and how far away I had to be to take these shots.

And here are a few pictures from our walk at the Conrad Weiser Park. The muskrat was busy gathering grasses to line its burrow. I think he might have eaten a blade or two along the way. The mockingbird didn't stay long enough in my opinion.

Spring is definitely in the air. This brown thrasher has arrived in a nearby park and was announcing his presence when I arrived for my afternoon stroll. About two hours later, he was still singing. That was one persistent bird.

The bluebirds were scarce but this ratty-looking bluebird appeared for a few moments before fleeing my sight along with a second one I hadn't previously noticed. As turned around to begin my walk back to the car, deer appeared in the meadow behind me.

Upon reaching my car, I noticed the moon was shining through the early evening sky, so I shot it, several times. I don't normally see this much detail in my daytime moon shots. The craters at the lower left are nicely detailed.

On December 19th, 2020, just a couple days before I headed back to PA for Christmas, we took a second trip to see the long-eared owl we had found the previous week. This time, we met with one of our fellow "birders" who knew where the saw-whet owl had been perching. After dropping in on the long-eared owl, still in the same tree where we had found it originally, but in a more open part of the tree, we ventured to the lake where we had first looked for the saw-whet and were met, unexpectedly, by the man who originally found the sasw-whet owl. After better than a half hour of searching the area where he had seen this tiny owl many times, it was not to be found. But this area is a deer-hunting area, and there were several orange-vested hunters in the area, so we didn't persist and soon headed home.

After returning home from the long-eared owl excursion, we had lunch and thought aboutagain heading out to Wegerczyn Metropark as someone had reported seeing a Merlin (tiny falcon) at this park. This is the same park where I shot the eagles and kestrel posted farther down this page. But, it was a freezing and blustery, gray, Ohio winter afternoon, so pushing ourselves to go back out into that uncomfortable environment took a lot of effort and determination. But, three and half hours after shooting the long-eared owl (above), we set off for Wegerczyn. We didn't get far. Only two blocks away, we spotted this merlin sitting on top of an electric pole at the local soccer grounds. While I hate shooting birds on poles with these grounding wires sticking out everywhere, you have to shoot things where you find them. Surprisingly, this merlin sat there for probably and hour and was still in place when we left and went back home to defrost!

On January 3rd, 2021, shortly before noon, this large Cooper's Hawk dropped into the back yard and sat on one of the fence posts along with "her" take-out meal. She probably took it out of air as she caught up with what appears to have been a starling! Finally, a natural predator for starlings. While it was a little grotesque seeing a bird torn into chunks, it disappeared quickly down this hawk's throat. It did seem to struggle a bit, here, with swallowing the legs. But it did. Eventually she hopped up into the bush in the background and cleaned herself off, rubbing her beak back and forth on the branch to wipe away any leftovers.

Having recently finished her starling lunch, the Cooper's hawk relaxed in the bush but kept a keen eye on the back yard for supper. A couple of hours after she departed, she reappeared on the side fence and continued her reconnaissance of the yard.

In keeping with the Nikon P1000 theme, I shot this photo of the sun to show a group of sunspots traversing the lower hemisphere, left to right, on the afternoon of December 27th, while visiting with my parents. Now you know what I was doing when I snuck out of the house in the middle of the day. This past year has seen a relatively low number of sunspots but tht activity seems to be increasing. Sunspot numbers tend to be rather cyclical over a many-year period. They reach peaks where large numbers appear over many months and lows, such as this past year, where there are many days or weeks of no sunspots at all and only one or two when there are any at all. The large spot on the right is many times the size of the earth to give you a little perspective on the giant blemishes on the face of the sun. They appear black to us as they are much cooler than the rest of the sun. But I wouldn't try to touch one given the opportunity. You would be vaporized in an instant!

Leaving work around 3:15PM, the dark and dreary day winter day suddenly came to life with my spotting of another of the large bucks on Huffman Prairie. The only camera in the car was my Nikon P1000, that I call my super zoom as it can zoom out to 3000mm (60x the magnification you see with your eyes.) The only issue is the tiny sensor is very grainy even shooting at its best ISO of 100. But, for even large animals at great distance, that's what it takes. It also requires shooting extremely slowly especially when it's a dark and dreary Ohio winter afternoon. So, I pulled into the golf course clubhouse parking lot, next to the driving range, grabbed my P1000, and set off, on foot, across the driving range, eventually reaching the edge of the thin wood line that divides that range from the open meadow where these large bucks tend to spend some of their afternoons before heading off into the more open Huffman Prairie near the skeet shooting range. As I slowly crept beyond the thin woodline, I could see at least four deer, three antlerless and this monster buck. While I raised the camera to my face, the buck stopped grazing and looked up in my direction. I stopped moving and waited for him to drop his head again. Eventually I managed to get the camera into position and began firing off a sequence of photos, slowing the shutter speed incrementally as I knew the first shots were almost completely black, even at 100th of a second. Eventually, I got down to 1/60th of a second and had to settle on that regardless of the exposure. At f/8 and ISO 100, even 1/60th of a second is a very dark picture on a dark, cloudy day. I ended up with more than a dozen photos before the small heard scampered off to the woods. Only three were anywhere near usable because of motion blur as I shook in the cold while taking these shots. I hadn't really noticed how cold it was when crossing the driving range on the way to this encounter. But, the return trek was bitter and it was beginning to spit tiny, icy raindrops in my direction. My dress shoes have yet to recover from the mud and deer poop covering parts of that range. By the way, this is not the same buck from my earlier posting for this same meadow. That buck was even larger (10 points.)

When I returned home from work this afternoon, Mary was staring out the kitchen window at this immature red-shouldered hawk. It was a cold, gloomy, gray sky, but the young hawk brightened it up perfectly. This is the second time we've seen this hawk in our back yard this week. Both times it was sitting on the same electric wire but on different sides of the yard. It didn't like the clicking of my camera and soon departed the yard.