Fieldfare!

This morning's snow is already melting so I had to act quickly to catch a picture of our winter visitors before they depart. This was one of the results. You can see some vignetting on the left hand side (I didn't want to risk the bird flying off while I tried to eliminate it) but it is the best picture I have made yet.

This morning I had the great pleasure of meeting fellow bloggers Adam, M6RDP and Paul, PC4T for the first time on the air - also a rare excursion on to SSB for me! Conditions were very up and down, and for much of the time both stations were down in the noise and hard to copy even with the K3 DSP noise reducer, but at times Adam's signal was peaking over S9 - very good for 10W.

It will be nice to make this a more regular event under hopefully better conditions.

First attempt at digiscoping

Adam, M6RDP caught my interest the other day when he wrote about a digital camera adapter that lets you take photos through the eyepiece of binoculars or a telescope. There have been many times I wished I could take a picture of what I could see through the spotting scope when watching birds. I decided to investigate and ended up at the same site where Adam bought his binoculars. The adapter pictured on his blog was on sale for under £30. That is a lot less than other similar products so I decided to get one now rather than regret not getting it later.

The gadget came this morning. First attempts to use it were a little disappointing. It wasn't really designed for my camera which has the lens very close to the bottom of the body. With the camera platform as high as it would go the camera still could not see into the eyepiece properly. In the end, I cut a strip from a cork drinks coaster (sorry, Olga) to go between the camera and the platform and raise it by an extra few millimetres which was just enough to get the image centered.

The next problem I found is that operating the shutter moved the camera / telescope giving a blurred image. Eventually I hit on the idea of using the shutter delay so that everything had stopped shaking by the time the picture was taken. This is not ideal for taking pictures of birds which are guaranteed not to stay in the same position for several seconds! Nevertheless I did manage to take one good picture of a robin on the bird feeder, which I think is not bad for a first attempt at digiscoping on a grey day, taken through a double-glazed window from inside the conservatory.

Winter migrants

My wife and I both enjoy watching wildlife. We always put out food for the birds, and get a surprising number of them in the garden - surprising because this is a built-up area and the size of our garden is less than the footprint of a three element tribander.

Because of the snow we are seeing a lot of winter visitors. This morning we saw six blackbirds at the same time, three fieldfares like the one above photographed from inside the conservatory by Olga, and a redwing.

Trying to photograph the birds makes you realise how hard these wildlife photographers work to earn their money. We have also enjoyed observing them through the spotting scope I bought a couple of years ago from Aldi. I have it set up on a camera tripod inside our conservatory. Being such a short distance away the birds fill the field of view so we can observe them in great detail. The fieldfares really are beautiful creatures.