A Common Bird Seen in Wayanad

Vitamin C - Ascorbic Acid

Indian Gooseberry (Phyllanthus emblica, also known as emblic, emblic myrobalan, myrobalan, Malacca tree, or amla from Sanskrit amalaki is a)

Patterns (Areca Palms)

Annular Solar Eclipse - Wayanad - Kalpetta -2019 December 26

The picture of the maximum of the annular eclipse on 26th December 2019 is taken from Kalpetta – Myladippara in Wayanad (11°37'28.6"N 76°05'34.3"E) using a 14mm f2.8 Samyang lens on a Canon full frame.

A view around 09:30am when the eclipse was at the peak, the ring is visible in this picture

Thanks to Rehal Bensy Paul for the suggestion of this wonderful location, he was kind enough to get up at 04:30 in the morning and to take me to this location by 05:00 am in his scooter. Thanks for his wonderful support throughout and for staying with me till the end of the planned time-lapse shoot (till 11:00 am). The location was astonishing and promising. I was excited to shoot the holy grail of time lapse with the stars early in the morning and fog getting cleared as the sun rises and then the actual eclipse, see the second picture posted here with the stars appearing before the dawn. We waited patiently and ramped down the exposure (a 20 sec exposure at f2.8 and 800 ISO in the beginning to 1/200 shutter speed, f11 and ISO 100-400) carefully without tripping the tripod or moving the camera as the light changed from starry night to the light of sunrise in the dawn.

Before dawn, the fog was well below our location lurking above and lighted up from the city lights of Kalpetta. Chembra peak (2100 meter from sea level) and mountains can be seen in the distance towards the right side of the horizon in this picture.

Initially everything progressed as we planned but the heavy rain that poured almost half an hour on the previous evening (Christmas day) caused heavy fog to cover the sky soon after sunrise and spoiled the entire plan. In fact most of the locations in Wayanad couldn’t witness the eclipse. Occasionally the sun cleared a bit and gave a glimpse of the partially eclipsed view through the heavy fog and was easy enough to look at without a solar filter film. But during the totality the sun was completely covered up by the foggy sky. I thought I wasted a lot of clicks and shutter actuations (around 2500 clicks from 05:00 am till11:00 am), after reaching back Ireland, I gave a rough try to process the RAW images into JPEG for a quick time-lapse, I found around 8 clicks during the totality that actually captured the eclipsed solar ring, the ring was more prominent when I adjusted the color curves, levels and other sliders a little bit, and the above picture is the final result. 

Can anyone identify what kind of bird it is?

This bird was spotted at night time around 10:00pm from a school ground in Wayanad during an astrophotography experiment. My brother turned the car towards these birds (a couple of them) and they got dazzled and blinded in the head lamps, so that I could easily get out of the passenger door and stay in behind the lamps unnoticed and unheard over the running engine of the car to get a few clicks. These birds were possibly feeding on termites or ants on the ground. They sized more or less than a foot in height.

Flowers from Wayand

An Evening at Payyampally

A Section of Thamarassery Churam (Ghat Road) that connects Wayanad and Kozhikode

Sunrise against the tallest man-made structure in Ireland

Strabane transmitting station is seen silhouetted in the foreground against the rising sun of 3rd January 2020 (around 08:58 am local time).

Wikipedia says "The Strabane transmitting station is a broadcasting and telecommunications facility located at Legfordrum and situated very close to the town of Strabane, in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It includes a 305.5 meters (1,002 ft) high guyed steel lattice mast, which is the tallest structure in Ireland. The transmission antennas surmounting the structure are contained within a fibreglass cylinder. Constructed in 1963, it came into service on 18 February of that year." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabane_transmitting_station)

According to Google map's distance measuring tool, the air distance to the transmitting station is 28.81 kilometer from the window of my house (Thornberry estate, Letterkenny) from where I clicked this image (refer the below image).