This photo was taken at Parc Omega Nature Preserve near Montebello, Quebec, Canada.

Tags:   Arctic Fox Canadian Arctic Fox Canadian Arctic Fox Parc Omega Montebello Quebec Canada Rudy POhl Nikon D7100 Nikon AF-S 300mm F4

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www.youtube.com/@Rudy.Pohl.Ottawa

Personal Update:

Greetings from Ottawa and I hope everyone is doing well out there in photoland. Because I haven't posted any images here for several weeks now some folks have sent me emails asking if I'm OK and are concerned that I've been sidelined by my rheumatoid arthritis once again.

I'm happy to report that I'm totally fine and my health is great. In fact I'm feeling better and stronger than I have in years. I've also been getting out in the field doing wildlife photography quite regularly and enjoying myself to the max.

The reason I have not been posting here is that I just felt I needed to step back and take a break for a while from publicly sharing my images and commenting on other people's images. I'm "going dark" for a while as the CIA would say. Thanks so much for your concern and stay well.
Rudy

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Taken at the Richmond Lagoons

After both Mom and Dad spent 30-40 minutes feeding the 8 little chicks, which are now 3 days out of the nest, Dad left while Mom got all the little ones securely corralled under her skirt of warm, protective feathers - time for a nap. They stayed this way for a long time and were still in this position when I left the area 20 minutes later.

Regarding my distance from the birds:
Someone commented on a previous image about how fortunate I was to be able to get so close to them. The truth is that I was actually quite far away and what you see here are the extreme limits of my photo-gear and my image processing method. I am using a 500mm lens with a crop-sensor camera resulting in an effective reach of 750mm. Additionally, I have deeply cropped the image to 100% viewing, something which I normally don't do, resulting in a 3.5 magnification factor which yields 750mm x 3.5 = 2625mm of reach. As well, to increase my chances of getting sharp images I used a tripod for all these shots. Taken together, these things resulted in a very close-up set of images that gives a sense of personal intimacy despite the rather poor image quality.

Click on image to enlarge it.

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This is a composite image where the foreground was shot earlier before total darkness and was blended with the sky image in Photoshop.

The sky is four 7-minute images tracked on a Star Adventurer and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, processed in Astro Pixel Processor and Photoshop CS5.

Nikon D5500
Nikon 12-24/f4 @ 18mm
Exposure time: 4 x 7-minutes = 28 minutes total
F5
ISO 400

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Click to enlarge.

This image shows a cloud of gas and dust full of bubbles, which are inflated by powerful winds and radiation created by nearby young, massive stars. Each bubble is filled with hundreds to thousands of stars, which form from the dense clouds of gas and dust in the area.

The bubbles are estimated to be 10 to 30 light-years across, based on what astronomers know about them and other cosmic bubbles. Powerful flows of particles emitted by these stars, called stellar winds, as well as the pressure of the light the stars produce, push the surrounding gas and dust material outward, creating the distinct bubble-like perimeters seen above. NASA astronomers have given designations some of these bubbles; the large one at the upper left is AFGL 2636 and the large one at the centre bottom is DR22..

This image reveals one of the most active and tumultuous areas of the Milky Way – Cygnus X. Located some 4,500 light years away, this huge violent dust cloud holds thousands of massive stars and even more of moderate size. It's literally a “star soup."

This is an infra red image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of a section of the Cygnus X region of the sky. It is located to the north-west of the image I posted previously here: www.flickr.com/photos/rudypohl/49069403498/in/photostream/

(Technical information by NASA).

Data acquisition: Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA
Data processing: Rudy Pohl
Image: RGB image as per colour mapping below
Colour mapping:
.... red channel: 24 μm Spitzer
.... green channel: 8 μm SpitzerSpitzer)
.... blue channel: 5.8 μm Spitzer
Processing software: ESA/ESO/NASA Fits Liberator 3, Photoshop CS5

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