follow that qar!

Butterfly watching has me attuned to caterpillars, so when I spotted this on a dogwood leaf this evening I was excited to find out which one I had discovered. Our Peterson First Guide didn't offer a match, so I went online to search on characteristics. That got me nowhere. Then I went to 'caterpillar maine dogwood' and up popped two images from Jim McCormac's blog entry on sawflies and yellowjackets. It's not a butterfly or a moth, it's a sawfly. bugman clued me into dogwood sawflies on What's That Bug? which itself pointed to Penn State 's Susan Parker with an Integrated Pest Management perspective and a Chris Adams entry on bugguide.net . On the latter site, danielj reports that correspondent Millie's image was a first for bugguide.net. There are others there . This squirmy thing had climbed to the tip of a pagoda dogwood, but we've got red osiers aplenty. Time to think twice about the positive first impression? "This is an ...

Seeking the fruit of fakir in short order. Nice image. Edit 2012-12-14: Never really got close.

In December 2008, numerous images were transmitted from the International Space Station to Earth using amateur radio slow-scan television. I copied the following images during four passes over northeastern North America. A few weeks earlier (October 2008), space tourist Richard Garriott was aboard the space station. In addition to making lots of contacts with Earthbound hams, he sent many SSTV transmissions and I was able to copy these. The final one, which I attempted in early morning darkness on his last ISS day, says "Goodbye From Space - From Richard Garriott". All these images were recorded using an Arrow antenna feeding a Vertex-Standard VX-150 2-meter handheld transceiver and a Sony voice recorder. The recordings were later played back through MMSSTV to acquire images, which were then labeled using Photoshop. This series was originally posted as individual nodes in Drupal, but with the demise of that website have been moved to Flickr and c...