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Smith - Campbell wedding had a beautiful bunch of blueweed that had attracted a large group of skipper butterflies!
Blueweed (Echium vulgare; also known as Blue devil, Blue-thistle, Viper's bugloss, vipérine, vipérine vulgaire, herbe aux vipères) is in the Boraginacae family. Often characterised as a 'weed', but a beautiful plant! http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/ontweeds/blueweed.htm I used autofocus here, and locked focus in http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=21704 How many skippers can you find? |
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Outside the entrance to Capitol Reef National Park is this particular outcrop - the red layers are offset just to the left of the mesa at the right side of the pan (I'll snapshot it...). There's a nice description of the geology on a nearby plaque (not visible here....) |
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Downtown Austin looking North from the south bank of Lady Bird Lake. |
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Mesic Red Oak-Northern Hardwood Forest, Salisbury, Vermont -- This well-drained kame terrace in the Salisbury Town Forest supports a dry example of this forest type with three oak species. The forest community is distinguished by the absence of sugar maple, an important component of hardwood forests on less droughty sites. It includes red oak, white oak, and chestnut oak, and I think at least one black oak (I have yet to get my hands on a leaf or acorn from it).
Some botanical and technical information is in a comment. |
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Colloquially called 'the blues' because of the blue-grey color, these sedimentary rocks outcrop in a canyon along Rte 12 in southern Utah.
The blue-grey rocks are part of the Cretaceous Kaiparowits formation, which formed when large rivers deposited their sediment. The orange layers in the distance are made up of younger Claron Limestone - this is the same rock unit that appears in Bryce Canyon. |
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That's the name given to this particular overlook along Rte. 12 in southern Utah. Large expanses of Navajo Sandstone make up the majority of the foreground rocks - these were once (millions of years ago) a vast expanse of sand dunes. The remnants of the dunes are found in structures called cross beds, where layers of sand from the dune meet layers of sand from the original surface at an angle. |
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Four friends taking a light-hearted break from exploring for fossils at Quarry 3 in the Changma Basin, northwestern Gansu Province, China. From left to right, quarry worker Mr. Zhang (Fossil Research and Development Center, Lanzhou), volunteer Jack Johnson, vertebrate paleontologist Matt Lamanna (Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh), and paleontology graduate student Jessie Atterholt (University of California at Berkeley). Quarries like this in the Changma Basin have thus far yielded thousands of ~110 million-year-old fossils, including approximately 100 partial to nearly complete skeletons of primitive birds. (Note that Jack moved during the shooting of this GigaPan...) |
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Another view of "the blues" in southern Utah, where blue-grey sedimentary rocks are exposed along Rte. 12.
These rocks were formed from sediments deposited by a river around 100 million years ago (Cretaceous period, Kaiparowits formation) |
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Practice photo for composition and set up.
To see the goal: http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=25859 |
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The backside of a small portion of the improvements being done around the town of Breckenridge, CO. |