These are dismal times. Every other day I hear about the loss of someone in the extended family, friends or neighbors. To maintain sanity, locked-in, small joys of life become ever more important.
The Spider Lily in my balcony decided to flower.
Every day, precisely between 5 PM and 6 PM, one or two buds will open. The petals first crack open a little, which rapidly expands. The bud soon assumes a spindle shape; one of the anthers sometimes already peeking out.
With no warning the petals snap open at the tip like a spring; blink and you miss it. There you have it a fresh beautiful Spider Lily flower. I love the way the 12 anthers of the two flowers that day stood up like sentinels eager to spread their pollen. By air, if I remember my high school botany correctly, because they swing on the filament.
I decided to make a time-lapse.
The time-lapse frame rate turned out to be too slow for the final moment of flowering. The movie below therefore goes through a time lapse (4X the normal speed), the normal video frame rate (where the bulge appears), and slow motion to capture the final moments (12% of the normal frame rate).
Citizen Science: If observations from n=1 are acceptable, the buds take much longer to open if it is dark. Two of the buds decided to open on the same day. One of them had already opened and the other was a now a spindle. Suddenly the clouds moved in and it became dark. The spindle shaped bud, which should have opened in less than ten minutes now took about an hour to become a flower. It was 7 PM by the time it was done.
(Technical: Movies and the stills were shot using iPhone 7, iOS 12.4.1. I do not own a tripod or selfie stick suitable for holding phones. I dusted my trusty old Bogen Manfrotto tripod. Took out the Bogen ball head mount, which needed some oiling. The head takes an hexagonal plate. Somehow my Capdase car windscreen phone holder fitted perfectly on the mount after the plate was removed. I found an extension cord to keep the phone charging, and was all set as far as the hardware goes. For the software part, I first had to find out from Internet the inner workings of different modes of the iPhone Camera app. As it turns out the time-lapse mode of the built-in App does not give users any control. Finally, I ended up using Hyperlapse, which has a hidden preference menu. Normal videos and the slow motion videos were recorded using the native Camera app. To transfer large video files from the iPhone to my MacBook Air, I again needed help from the internet. Unbelievable, but one does not realize the complications until you try to do it. Finally, to make a single video clip that plays at different speeds, I had to relearn iMovie. Apple online iMovie manual is good.) Comments are closed.
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This is our irregular blog. We will post about space, cartoons, science, happenings or whatever takes our fancy. Any comments can be e.mailed to neeraj[dot]jain4e4a[at]gmail[dot]com
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