Page 22 - Black Range Naturalist Oct 2020

For visually-impaired humans, the big event of the season was the appearance of Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) in our northern sky. It was seen best during June and July.
On July 15, Jon Barnes photographed the comet with a cell phone. The photograph (below) was a 10 second exposure shot at 800 ISO with an aperture of 1.4.
The Big Dipper Ursa Major
On July 18 Jon Barnes once again used a cell phone to photograph the comet (lower right) on a cell phone (400 ISO, 10 second exposure, 1.5 aperture). These images demonstrate a wide array of insight: 1) You don’t always need advanced technologies to study the night sky, a cell phone works nicely for the documentation of many phenomena; 2) Our society is marked by numerous sublime juxtapositions; yes, the image was taken by a cell phone — but that streak is about as technologically advanced as you can get; and 3) That the study of the natural world can remain fresh in our minds for as long as our minds function - especially if given a little nudge by imagery (whether a photograph, a rock art engraving, or a drawing on a bit of pottery).
Track of International Space Station
Comet NEOWISE, C/2020 F3
The Big Dipper, Ursa Major
Comet NEOWISE, C/2020 F3
The night sky is integrated with the human cultural history of our region. The Mimbres recorded supernova, comets, and the movement of stars and planets. For them, many of those observations were linked fundamentally to their survival.
The OTHER Pandemic....Rabbit
Hemorrhagic Disease( RHD) by Kathleen Blair
The Lagomorph (rabbits, hares, and pikas) order’s evolutionary linage is among the oldest of the mammals, yet they have changed relatively little in the 85-100 million years of their fossil record. Not long after the dinosaurs went extinct, they had already been around long enough to evolve distinctive characteristics like a hopping gate and double front teeth, as well as a few traits usually associated with marsupials. Today, one of the 90 or so species is naturally found on every continent but Australia and Antarctica – tropical to tundra, deserts to swamps – where they form a critical part of most food chains. Everybody eats bunnies! So, if rabbit and hare populations take a serious, long-term dive, a lot of food webs can be damaged. A few of the most well known species belong to the genus Lepus
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