Lunar Ecllipse of December 21, 2010

I stayed-up last night to photograph the lunar eclipse.  It was 3:00 AM when I took the last photo and called it quits.  Had I stayed up until sunrise, I would have had the reverse of what you see in this collage.  This sight will never occur again in my lifetime.  I believe it will be another 500 years before North America will see a total lunar eclipse again.

MISCELLANEOUS MACROS

This closeup of the movement of an Elgin Railroader's pocketwatch is similar to the one my grandfather Angelo Pizzo owned.  He came to this country in the early 1900's and worked as a railroader most of his life.  At one point he helped lay rail in the Oklahoma Territory before it became a state.

The thorny-back spider looks ferocious but is fairly harmless and not aggressive at all.  It is usually found in the center of a web that it makes in wooded areas where there are plenty of low branches near the ground.  I can remember many times as a boy how I "freaked out" when the web of one of these guys would wrap around my face while hiking through the woods of Southern Indiana.

 

I saw this box of buttons in my wife Becky's sewing room and thought the colorful arrangement would make and interesting photo.

Another box in my wife's sewing room contained this colorful assortment of spools of thread. Becky loves to make quilts and give them as gifts to members of our family.  One magnificent quilt she recently finished as a Christmas present for our daughter Jenny took her almost a year to complete.

This spider has eight eyes. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can count them.

One morning I saw a beautiful green Luna moth on a tree outside our cabin.  I was able to get close enough to capture this image of an eyespot on the Luna's wing.  If you click on the photo for a closeup, you can see that the wings are covered with tiny colored scales.  Butterflies and moths belong to the insect order Lepidoptera, which when translated in Latin means "scale wing".

To me, this flower looks like a swimming or flying animal of some sort.  I discovered it on a plant growing along a creekbank in North Carolina. It is commonly called

the Touch-Me-Not,  but is also known as Impatiens capensis, the orange jewelweed,  the common jewelweed,  the spotted jewelweed or the orange balsam. It is called touch-me-not because its ripened seed pods explode when touched. The result is that the seeds are scattered in all directions.  A very clever seed dispersal mechanism.

This treefrog was resting on a leaf in our backyard in Sarasota and let me get close enough for this one shot before it jumped and disappeared into the foliage.

This is the first macro photo that I ever took with a digital camera.  It's the larva of the polyphemus moth that I spotted it crawling along the bottom of a twig in my yard.  I often wonder if it ever spun a cocoon and metamorphosed into the beautiful Polyphemus.

Believe it or not, this image was made without a camera.  I used a chambered nautilus shell that had been sawed-in-half to show its chambers, and scanned it with my Kodak ESP 55250 flatbed scanner.  The dark background was formed by a box with a black interior that I used as a cover during scanning. 

Here's another unusual insect that I found in our Sarasota backyard that is not what it seems to be.  It's some sort of a moth that appears to mimic a colorful bee or fly.

Outside of our cabin in North Carolina we have a flowering plant called a red poker plant.  This is a closeup of one of its flower clusters.

This is a closeup is of an old antique typewriter, circa 1923, whose keyboard that still works.

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I found this snail crawling across a cluster of coral fungus on a rotting log in the woods of Western North Carolina.

When this orange dropped to the ground from our tree, it provided a temporary resting place for this jumping spider.

MESA VERDE RUINS IN COLORADO

This series of photo was taken at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado in 2006 when my brother Angelo and I spent three days visiting various National Parks in Colorado, Arizona, and Utah..
These ruins near Durango were left by the pre-Pueblo Anastasi indians who lived here around 570 AD and left long before Columbus discovered America. Contrary to popular belief, the Ancestral Puebloan people of Mesa Verde did not disappear. They migrated south to New Mexico and Arizona, and became today’s modern pueblo people
 I used a hand-held Olympus C8080WZ digital camera.  The shots were made in the Program mode, with no flash at f 2.4, 1/30 sec, and ISO 79.  

After visiting the ruins, Angelo and I hiked the Petroglyph Point Trail to find the ancient petroglyphs made over a thousand years ago by the Anastasi.  Mesa Verde is well over 8000 feet in elevation, so you can probably imagine how this old Florida boy was huffing and puffing on the three mile trail.  Angelo on the other hand, who lives in Pagosa Springs, Colorodo year round, seemed to be hardly out of breath.  Here you can see Angelo pausing to marvel at images on the rock face that seem to have been made just yesterday. 

This closeup of a portion of the cliff wall shows petroglyphs that tell a story of something important happening those many years ago.

NORTH CAROLINA AUTUMN

Hiking up a mountain trail near our cabin in North Carolina, I came across this stretch of path that seemed to beg me to take this picture.

As I progressed down the path, I looked up and saw that the overhead tree canopy was ablaze with color.

At the bottom, on the other side of the mountain,  I came across this hayfield with newly harvested bales of hay.

It was a perfect day for taking pictures.

The autumn foliage was just beginning to peak during this the second week of Ocober, 2010.  I took a few shots and started my hike back home.  When I reached the cabin, I thought to myself that there had been many missed photographic opportunities in that hayfield that I should have taken advantage of before I left it , so I decided that I would return the next day to take more photos.  Well, I went back to the hayfield the next day a little before noon, and was dismayed to see that all of the haybales had disappeared.  Apparently, the bales had been picked-up and removed by the farmer that morning.  Maybe next year, if  I go back to the same field in October, the missed opportunity will be there for me again.