This interesting photo is of a cluster of cholla flowers in bloom just behind the wall next to the little wash. I liked the appearance of the crimson-tipped yellow flowers framed by the spiky stems of cactus.
Our friend, Crotalus tells us that this is a buckhorn cholla and that there are dozens of varieties of the cylindropuntia family of cacti. Click on the image to enlarge.
NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto released this image yesterday of planet Pluto and it’s satellite Charon. The distance between the imaging spacecraft and the two objects was about 71 million miles when this photo was taken.
At first glance, the colors appear to be quite close to those depicted in space artist Dan Durda’s 2001 illustration (commissioned by NASA) of the planetary system panorama seen here. The reddish color of Pluto is brighter than its grayish companion. Click on the image to enlarge.
First Pluto-Charon Color Image from New Horizons
This image of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, was taken by the Ralph color imager aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on April 9 and downlinked to Earth the following day. It is the first color image ever made of the Pluto system by a spacecraft on approach. The image is a preliminary reconstruction, which will be refined later by the New Horizons science team. Clearly visible are both Pluto and the Texas-sized Charon. The image was made from a distance of about 71 million miles (115 million kilometers)—roughly the distance from the Sun to Venus. At this distance, neither Pluto nor Charon is well resolved by the color imager, but their distinctly different appearances can be seen. As New Horizons approaches its flyby of Pluto on July 14, it will deliver color images that eventually show surface features as small as a few miles across.
Some of us have been waiting for fifteen years to see the images from New Horizons. We’re looking forward to seeing more as the spacecraft looms closer.
This nice little barrel cactus (species unknown) has almost a complete ring of flowers around its crown. Each station where a flower bud appears can be traced back to the crown of the cactus by following the smooth curves that connect the fuzzy peaks along the top. Click on the image to enlarge.
Bob posted some information about mathematical formations in nature along with a photo of this very cactus without flowers a couple of years ago. Just like in the image above, the post showed examples of Fibonacci spirals, both natural and man made.
Well, not in the shark sense, but today I was in the courtyard with the camera and telephoto lens looking for photo targets of opportunity. All of a sudden several goldfinches were competing for perches on Damsel’s feeder out front. I got this lucky shot while the competition was still on. Shortly after I took the photo, the birds had all settled on the six available perches and were calmly picking seeds out of the feeder.
Camera: Canon EOS Rebel SL1 – Focal length 300mm – F5.6 – ISO 200 – SS 1/400 sec. The range was about 10 yards. Click on the image to enlarge.
We don’t have any of these in our inventory, but it might be nice to get one or two of them out in the west rock and cactus garden. they take up a bit more space than the Red Bird of Paradise which we have in the courtyard. A couple of the latter are beginning their annual new growth to become the four foot high shrubs with similar but brighter flowers than above. Click on the image to enlarge or click on the like to see the new growth.
When we were in town the other day, we took a roundabout way home along a street known to have a lot of prickly pears in the homes’ landscape gardens. I was not disappointed when I saw that a few of their flowers had begun to open.
I couldn’t tell you which variety of prickly pear (opuntia) these were on, but they differed in flower color, paddle color and needle arrangements. The flower on the left is deep orange in color (it looked reddish from a distance) and the one on the right is a more common yellow color. Click on either image to enlarge.
Other than the beavertail variety, none of the prickly pears in our yard have open flowers, but there will be some for sure. I’m looking forward to seeing the flowers open on our lawyer’s tongue cactus that currently has several flower buds for the first time since we planted it in the rock and cactus garden.
