The Drinking Bird

Just received my new Astronomy Technologies AT106LE refractor (106mm f/6.5, FPL53 triplet). Of course, with it comes the curse of more bad weather (it's supposed to snow for the next three days). Still don't have anything to mount it on (new CGE coming on Tuesday, along with more bad weather, I'm sure).

I'll hopefully get to use it once spring rolls around somewhere around, oh, June.

Recently, the Cassini space probe which has been cruising through the Saturn system made a close pass at the planet's moon Mimas. The probe was able to take a remarkable image showing the moon's most prominent feature: a crater 130 km across. This is a scar from an impact that almost completely shattered the moon to pieces. The angle and position of this crater really caught my eye.

So, the question now is, just how much of a visionary is George Lucas? There are some who insist that Lucas ripped off the design of the Death Star from an early image of Mimas. However, until Voyager 1 reached Saturn in 1980, the surface features of Mimas was not known. Unless Lucas has a time machine, there's no way he could have known what this moon looked like at the time of the release of "A New Hope" in 1977.

Is George Lucas more of a visionary than he gets credit for? Does he indeed have a time machine? Perhaps he loaded his time machine to Steven Spielberg to help in the making of "Jurassic Park"? Or diiiidd he??

Hey, I'm only asking the questions...

A few more afternoons poking my 300mm lens out my window has uncovered some of the avian drama unfolding in my own back yard. Ok...it's birds fighting over a bird feeder. Not so exotic, but what can one expect from a site in the middle of a city in Central Illinois.

Here we see a couple of shots of a cardinal and sparrow vying for position:

Sitting idly by contentedly munching on safflower seeds from a tray feeder is a female cardinal:

I've also got suet cakes put out to try and attract Woodpeckers and Blue Jays, but so far all they've brought in are the ugliest, clumsiest bird species I've ever seen - the European Starling:

I hate these birds. They're an invasive, non-native species that are like avian locusts. Every one of the 200 million starlings that are in North America are descended from a flock of about 60 released in New York's Central Park in 1860. They were introduced by a guy who thought it would be a good idea to release every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare into North America. Dumb ass...

It's because of these winged rats that I don't have any jays or wood peckers visiting my yard. The suet cakes don't last long enough.

...it could get better!

This XKCD sums it up. The rollover text says everything that needs to be said.

The sun actually came out for a bit today and gave me some good light to get some shots of birds visiting my feeder.

These were taken with my Canon Rebel XSi (450D) at ISO 200 with my 300mm f/4 EF-L lens. The more I use this lens the more I like it. Its sheer bulk and weight make up for the nice images it gives.