Autographa glitch: 'The Answer is Blowing In The Wind'

[rjlittlefield]

In my Autographa, stacked and stitched, there's a chunk of image that looks like this.



In response to a question, I referred to this section of image, writing as follows.

Then at the bottom of the picture, in the blown-up background, you can see a half dozen very sharp prongs, pointing down in the picture. Those are actually loose scales, from somewhere on the body I think, that got caught up in the wing scales and didn't come loose when I dusted the critter with CO2. I didn't notice them until I had already shot the stacks, and then I decided they were so interesting that I'd highlight them in the montage.

Something about this description bothered me. The feeling got stronger when I tried to take some closer shots of this area and found that the loose scales were no longer there.

Hhmm, I guess they must have come completely detached and blown away.

Or did they?

I went back to my original stack of images and viewed it in "filmstrip" mode.

A rather different picture emerged.



I'm still laughing about this. Those apparently four loose scales are in fact one loose scale -- barely stuck down at its base, and waving around madly in the gentlest of air currents over my table. There were only 4 out of 100 frames in the whole stack where the loose scale was sharply focused, and Helicon Focus dutifully preserved every one of them!

I think I'll leave the image the way it is. This'll make a nice conversation piece!

--Rik

[beetleman]

Very interesting story Rik. You do notice everything and investigate to its fullest. That happened to me in a marigold stack I tried. Seems a little spider was weaving in and out from under the petals and in the final stack I had four spiders showing up in different places.

[MacroLuv]

Maybe it could be useful in some cases when you have only one subject but need more.

[Bruce Williams]

Hi Rik,

Yeah it was me that originally raised the question about the little white prongs. I noticed them when I was looking at the full size image (amazing detail by the way). It was actually the upward facing prongs in the forewing not the replicated ones that caught my eye.

Strangely enough the reason I noticed them at all was that they reminded me so much of the (totally unrelated) seed prongs on the cone of the Douglas-Fir tree. I always think of them as little mouse diving for cover.
Unfortunately I can't locate my own photos of the Douglas cone (must get my files into some sort of order), however if you're interested check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Douglas_(botanist)

Hey what do y'know, in searching for a pic I came across this webpage - and I thought I was the only one who saw mice when there weren't any:

http://www.planetozkids.com/oban/dougfir.htm

Bruce