In my second attempt at doing some time lapse photography, I captured both the sunset and the following sunrise.

To demonstrate what I mean by shifting of the position of the sun on the horizon that I described in the previous post, here are two sunrise pictures from separate times of year at Palo Verde.  On the left is a photo I took in January and on the right is a photo I took this morning.  I know it’s not a new discovery to science, but I thought it was still cool to see, particularly because my previous experience steered me wrong in predicting the sun’s location; I had neglected to factor in the change in the earth’s tilt relative to the sun from January to May, which results in a sunrise that is further to the north.  Science is cool.

… I bring you the sunrise… well, without the sun.  In my second attempt to create a time lapse movie, I was unable to predict the location of the sun this morning.  When Adam, a graduate student who’s currently staying here for an OTS course, asked where we should point our cameras to get a good shot of the rising sun, I assumed that it would rise in roughly the same position on the horizon that it had in January of 2008 and 2007; over the mountains show in this video.  Nevertheless, the sun rises in a vastly different position now, in May.  Thus, neither Adam nor I took time lapses that included the sun in the frame.  Live and learn.

There was some fantastic fog though.

… I bring you; the sunset.  This is my first attempt at time lapse photography, and, although this was the first sunset that I’ve seen in Palo Verde that was dominated by clouds, I think it came out well. The choppiness and appearance of upward movement of the sun is a result of cloud cover, so perhaps I’ll attempt this again sometime soon to get a clearer, more standard sunset.

My camera doesn’t have an automatic interval shutter release setting, so I sat in the wetland and pushed the shutter release every 20 sec for about an hour and ten minutes.  Almost the entire time, a calf stood next to me and mooed loudly.  Let me know what you think.

This is what the wetland currently looks like, for the most part. The areas in this post that are dark, are caked mud, whereas the light brown areas are decomposing hyacinth beds or another plant species I’m working on identifying.

Half way to Rio Tempisque…no water, only cow trails and a bit of Typha.