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https://youtu.be/kc_i5dQegmA Here's the progress so far on the timelapse. I'm going to have another crack sometime as the stars jump about due to a misconfigured slow-motion plugin (the original is 32 seconds long, I might have to meet it in the middle and aim for a minute and a half or so,) but overall I'm pretty happy with the result. Definitely worth the effort. I'm going to have another shot on the 19th of August with my 6D, that should yield some incredible results as the 1100D only really manages to capture the night sky as blobs of light without too much definition. I'm hoping to be able to see the Milky Way with this next round if there's another clear night

Ahh!! I completely forgot that I'd stumbled upon this gem last night, I'll be using this to coordinate future shoots. Even allows for the simulation of lenses etc so I can set a GPS location, set up a virtual shot and check it against a few test shots on the camera to ensure that I'm getting what I want in frame every time. I also checked out the EOS utility's functionality with the 6D, and it allows for full control over the shutter speed, f-stop and iso, as well as a low-resolution live feed.. via wi-fi :D https://stellarium.org/ Absolutely incredible, free and open source- just the way it should be!

That's an awesome foray into the world of night sky photography right there! I had no idea you could mount a DSLR to a telescope, I'm going to have to look into that!! Last night I camped out taking an ~800 shot timelapse of the night sky. My landlord was doing some fuel load reduction and there was this epic bonfire going, and the night was crystal clear. I checked out a sky map and saw that Jupiter and Saturn were set to chase the moon across the sky. I made some clunky measurements and oriented myself using features of the landscape (one thing I do not own is a compass, which I find embarrassing,) and am currently rendering out the product of a similar struggle with the program Darktable. I tried Rawtherapee as well and have settled on Darktable as it works a little more intuitively for me and I'm consistently impressed with the output. The workflow reduced me to caveman grunts the first 5 times I used it, before I realised that you organise your files and arrange exports in the lighttable part, and process the images in the darktable screen. Figuring out how to apply styles etc required a defeated trip to the documentation, but I've currently got it spitting out an image sequence of tifs which I'll convert to a movie with ffmpeg and finally import into a video editor. I'll post the results when it's done; at this stage it's currently taking about a minute and a half per frame but the resulting image is more or less noise free and has this rather satisfactory cinematic depth and colour treatment; a pretty damn good result for photos taken at 800 ISO on the old Canon 1100D. I was astounded when I saw the moon rise tonight- Jupiter and Saturn now appear to have overtaken it in their race across the sky. I felt positively compelled to set up and take that sequence last night, it was an effort of will as I've been feeling very lethargic as of late. I had also caught wind from a reliable source that the news wasn't good for Victoria and knew that I would get stuck in a loop of fretting and online research if I didn't do something to fight against that urge. I had no idea that I would be capturing something quite incredible in the alignment of those celestial bodies, and it was only as I was in the final stages of preparing to set up that I noticed that my starsign of Libra would be setting on the horizon at the start of the shoot. I was about 15 degrees off my intended shot so it'll be interesting to see if I still managed to capture it. Another constellation I hope I've captured is the rather inappropriately named Corona Australis Will post the results ASAP! Keen to see other peoples' sky shots!

Alrighty, so I've never used a Lumix camera myself but I managed to find a couple of guides that will hopefully explain the buttons you need to press to enter manual exposure mode. If you've had experience with SLRs and long-exposure photography in the past you'll find it very easy to take some amazing shots in the digital world. I only had a little bit of experience with film SLRs in high school (I think I still have the negative of my one and only long-exposure shot from Year 11 media class, if I ever find it I'll scan it in!) but when I started messing around with my Canon 1000D 6 years ago it took me about half an hour to start taking photos that made peoples' jaws drop. Here's a text guide that has more to do with what each individual shooting mode does on Lumix cameras, https://lumixexperience.panasonic.co.uk/learn/expert-advice/exposure-modes-explained/ and this Youtube tutorial seems pretty in-depth and informative, hopefully it helps you get past the technical barrier of setting a digital camera up for night-time/sky photography: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpXbUUW4qIM I managed to find a few of my old night-time shots on an old SD card, I've got a lot of processing to do (about 100gb of images!!) but as I plow through it I'll upload my favourites. All the best!

It seems that there's a few white ones hanging out with the majority being these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw-necked_ibis If I can get a bit closer at some point I'll try and get some detail of those beautiful iridescent feathers on the wings. I think I need to calibrate the lens as well so I can draw a sharper bead on them when they're in flight. Many projects up in the air at the moment! While I'm thinking of it, if anybody shoots with a Canon DSLR, have a look into a firmware hack called Magic Lantern- it unlocks and adds several features such as an intervalometer for lower-end cameras without that feature and exposure ramping, so you can automate a series of shots of say, the day turning to night by slowly increasing the shutter speed. In regards to da boids it also adds a 'trap' shot mode, so you set your focal point and the shutter fires automatically when something enters the frame. On top of that, it allows for raw video shooting (which requires a fast SD card and is limited by the data transfer rate of the camera itself,) and FPS override-- so basically, it lets you shoot at up to 8000fps from memory (theoretically, you need the highest of high-end DSLRs for that...) It blows the thing wide open and allows you to turn a low-end Canon into something with a feature set that rivals their higher-end, full-frame models. With great power comes great responsibility though, it's finicky as hell and you CAN brick your camera if you have the misfortune of losing power as it loads the firmware in or out. Much research required, I've been testing it on my 1100D (the 6D I shot the above photo on I'm not so keen on at the moment, I've only had it for a couple of months!) and everything works wonderfully except the video modes, which cause the thing to lock up and require a reset/battery out-and-in every few minutes while you're trying to figure out how to get the thing to work. It's allegedly much more reliable on full-frame models, the 1100D/Rebel XTi support has only been added recently and is stated as being very much in alpha state. My head overflows with these ideas but I'm planning on using data from www.suncalc.org (fun for everybody!!) to plan time-lapses and try to keep the lighting consistent which I look forward to sharing in the future. For those interested in Magic Lantern: https://magiclantern.fm/ There is a very handy online calculator which allows you to figure out the limits of your camera- the raw movie mode is limited by the transfer rate and buffer on the camera, so you can shoot at x FPS for y seconds at z resolution/bit-depth. This little dealy allows you to plan shots out based on the limits of your camera's hardware: https://rawcalculator.netlify.app/calculator_desktop Mentioned above, Suncalc is an online map overlay which allows you to pinpoint where the sun will be, the angle and shadow length thereof at any point in time, anywhere in the world. It's the most useful thing I've ever been introduced to for the planning stage of permaculture designs, and for the photographer/nature lover it allows one to calculate, say, the most epic place to enjoy a sunrise or camp out (when we're allowed to again ) from the comfort of your own home. https://www.suncalc.org Can you tell I've been cooped up inside for too long? I do hope I'm not flooding the place with my posts too much

Interesting, glad I'm not alone with this one. I managed to upload one image after getting the old Error 200 a couple of times, figured that it had to do with filesize and a scaled version uploaded fine. Unfortunately I'm having issues uploading a 900kb image to the Mycology gallery, smaller than the other I did manage to get up there, so I'm wondering if there's some trick or workaround that I'm not aware of? I'm trying to post directly to the Mycology gallery if that makes a difference, would making my own gallery within that work perhaps? Also, glad it isn't just me having troubles changing pages etc. A workaround for that is to edit the page address in your browser and change the value after '&page=' at the end to the page number you want to view. I run a lot of script blocking stuff (noscript and uBlock origin as well as duckduckgo's privacy extension (SAB forum gets a B+ from duckduckgo, which is about as high as it goes- I've never seen an A or A+ for what it's worth,)) so I imagine that at least part of this is a me problem, but it does seem that something's not jiving on the backend/databases side of things. Forum software is *cough* fun to administrate and notorious for breaking so I'm aware that it isn't just a case of 'fix it' for the admin who likely have better things to do than take a software engineering course on the side, so developing some workarounds and publishing those would be cool.

Got 'em! Well, managed to get most of them in frame anyway. Note the ducky atop the lopped tree right of centre In previous years that paddock has belonged to the ducks, it seems that the ibis (please tell me they're ibis, hahahah!) are making their move now- perhaps this is the avian equivalent of annexing and acquiring further territory?

Absolutely incredible Ferdie, thanks for sharing this! I've had a similar idea in the past but absolutely nothing like this. Love the extent to which you're planning it out, and it seems like a solid idea on paper. I think the mycelium will definitely want to consume the structure but it should last years before it becomes an issue, if it ever does at all. Very much looking for further updates. Are you planning on a heating system for the water? Sourcing massive bags of epsom salts for the floatation aspect? I'm reminded of an outdoor bath setup on a farm I WWOOFED at, basically a rocket stove into a series of pipes under a bathtub which resulted in an obnoxiously gleeful bathing experience, looking out at the mountains in the distance in what must have been 50-60 degree water heated with a handful of twigs sitting next to the tub.

They're there again today- they're taking over! Very fascinating to watch, they're very synchronised in their movements. Pretty typical bird flocking behaviour but because they're so chunky it's quite impressive seeing this massive fleet of curved beaks and flashes of black and white moving as one.... I'll try get a photo if I can get a good shot in!

Absolutely! Most cameras allow you to set manual shutter times, which is how you get those 'star trail' shots. What kind of camera do you have? I'm happy to look up how to manually set the shutter speed/ISO/aperture (f-stop) and let you know how to do it with your particular camera! It's a lot of fun and also allows you to do 'light painting,' where you run around with a torch and draw patterns which show up as these really beautiful trails on the final image. All you need is a tripod and a camera, but you can also get a little remote control kinda thing that allows you to hold the shutter open for as long as you like. It takes some practice but it's really fun and rewarding.

Woke up to a crew of about 50-70 white ibis in the backyard. Very amusing birds to watch, very very pretty. I've seen a few about before but never in such large quantities- I've lived here for about 3 years. I think we're going to see a noticeable increase in wildlife this spring; seeing how quickly nature's adapting now we're out of the way is pretty awesome.

I'm going to start doing a spot of night sky photography again in about a months' time when I'll have a largely unpolluted landscape to survey. I'll post some piccy pics and perhaps some timelapses when I get the chance. Think of this what you may, but I'm considering the purchase of a cheap old DSLR (another one, hahah) to press into duty doing semi-regular timelapses in the hopes of catching some... anomalies. I'll be about 40-50km away from an RAAF base so y'know...

Fantastic George, I'll send you a PM now. Looking forward to this project, just as we'll be coming into spring as well. Magic

Hooked within 5 seconds. This is fucking awesome. Followed, and I'll grab a copy when I've got a bit of coin behind me, heheh