August 17, 2019 Last Wednesday, Fukuoka was sideswiped by a large typhoon named Krosa. Luckily, there wasn’t much damage by wind or rain in the area. I decided to go to the top of a mountain near my home and do a cloud time lapse from late afternoon passing into night. The clouds just after a typhoon passes, are often of varied shapes and sizes, that are good subjects for photography.
Before the sun could slip behind the mountains, the clouds descended upon me and the camera. I let the camera click away for about thirty minutes in hopes that the clouds would lift again, but it was not to be.
Occasionally in the video, there are black specks. These were swifts flashing by just as the shutter clicked. I envy them their mastery of the air, flying just below and even among the clouds at times.
Here is a video I uploaded to YouTube after Typhoon Jongdari passed over Fukuoka last July. It was never posted on this site.
August 11, 2019 I went to Omijima in Nagatomachi, Yamaguchi prefecture on the nights of August 9th and 11th to watch and photograph the night seas and skies. I went there last year for the same reason. Though it wasn’t the peak of the annual Perseid meteors, you can still see quite a few, especially at a location that has dark skies, like Nagatomachi. I was able to see around 50 or so, though none of them appeared in any of the camera frames. Here is the time lapse of those two unforgettable nights.
August 3, 2019 The dog days are upon us with a vengeance this year. If you think the phrase originates from the suffering of dogs in the heat of the summer, then you would be wrong. The phrase actually comes from the ancient Greeks and Romans. It correlates to the rising of the ‘Dog Star’ Sirius in the summer. Sirius is the brightest star in the heavens, and is located in the constellation Canis Major. It is so bright that the Greeks and Romans believed it increased the heat during summer months, among other things.
Partly to escape the scorching heat during the daylight hours, but mostly to see and photograph the night skies and hopefully a meteor or two, I took the opportunity to drive to the aptly named Hoshinomura (Village of the Stars) at the end of July. Two meteor showers, the Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids would be active.
After I set up the camera, it began to cloud up with low clouds rolling in from the south. Maybe no meteors tonight, I thought, but I like clouds too, so let the camera roll and see what happens. Lo and behold; out of the 600 plus frames taken that night, the 10th frame had caught a meteor streaking along the Milky Way. It turned out not to have originated from either the Aquariids or the Capricornids according to the IMO, International Meteor Organization which I recently registered with. (see link below)
MOSTLY BIRDS 