From this afternoon – it’s a jumble of proto-feathers, beaks and claws in there. No headcount possible anymore, but they’re definitively growing like they want to leave the nest tomorrow :-).

The only photo I got yesterday of ESA’s ATV-4 Albert Einstein space transporter, which has launched on Wednesday and is on its way to the ISS. I totally botched this one – I didn’t expect it to be so dim and I forgot to turn on RAW saving, so the result looks horrible… but the trail is visible. I’m going to try again later tonight – the ATV is now on the same orbit as the ISS and comes just about 15 minutes after the space station. Check your location on Heavens-Above.com, you can watch yourself!

I found this tiny little spider lounging on a strawberry blossom recently :-).

I haven’t processed the photos from today, so here’s another one from yesterday – beak alert! :-)

I wanted to do something different for the second ISS pass yesterday, so I turned the camera sideways and did a 128-second exposure to get a really long view of the pass. Again, I didn’t even attempt to filter out the noise, only a little colour correction and contrast/brightness balancing. The sensor glow is still there, but not so distracting because it’s at the bottom in the tree – the glow on the horizon is, however, real light pollution from the city around us.

Some more lilac. And I’ve had it with the roman numerals… I’m switching to real numbers now :-).

Okay, I think I’m getting the hang of the new camera now. This is the ISS pass from about 0:33 to 0:40 a short while ago – travel direction is right to left in this 64-second exposure. I brightened it up a bit to bring the startrails out, but I left the noise in because filtering would just result in a blurry mess. I got the ATV transporter in a seperate image too, but I somewhat botched the first attempt – I’m going to post the second attempt tomorrow, or rather later today :-).