Day 125 Friday 25th July 2014 A long day and night and a long blog - Cabo de Gata and its Birds then out with the stars. - Astronomy Blog

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Jul252014

Day 125 Friday 25th July 2014 A long day and night and a long blog - Cabo de Gata and its Birds then out with the stars.

Friday, July 25, 2014 at 4:55PM

I spent the day at Cabo de Gata with my camera - the hides are a long way from the birds but managed to snap a few with my 500 mm lens. It would be good if there was a managed walkway to the water's edge on Hide 1. I need to go back and investigate the footpaths to get a closer view.

This is Hide #1 on the main road into Cabo de Gata village.

This is a Barn Swallow (Hirundo Rustico) over the salt marshes.

There are hundreds of Phoenicopterus roseus - the Greater Flamingo on the lake. Some of these will have returned from the dried out Camargue in France (a breeding ground) to take advantage of the water and the food it contains.

There were also many Recurvirostra avosetta - i.e. Avocets - probably into the hundreds - here are some with some flamingos

and an Avocet in flight

The images below show a Black Winged Stilt. Because of the long dry spell in Southern Spain some of these birds have gone north to the UK and chicks were born there last month for the first time in 27 years. See this article from the RSPB.

There were quite few Black Tailed Godwits on the lake.

The night was clear and I used the SkyX exclusively for all operations with the new add ons. I went through the T-Point Process from scratch - initially synching on Mars. I mapped 20 points on the west side of the Meridian and then slewed to Altair on the east side and mapped 20 more points, I noticed at 25 total points a tick appeared on T Point to tell me that I had sufficient points to set up a model. I carried on to 40 points however and clicked finish in T Point to tell it to use that set of points. I clicked the supermodel button and was ready to try out the ponting accuracy!

This is the final scatter plot