A Barn Owl Visits the Farm

I stood next to the telescope and listened.  I had just turned the telescope over to computer control, and it was making its first exposure of the night.  A Barn Owl had called from the tree line on the border of our field.  The sound took me by surprise.  Unlike spring and summer evenings, winter nights are mostly quiet, with an occasional coyote chorus or a passing freight train.

Until that night, the weather in February had been terrible for astrophotography.  Now I had only a couple of days left before the moon again reclaimed the sky, making it too bright to image galaxies.  A slender crescent moon was already in the western sky.  The forecast for this evening and the next was “mostly cloudy.”  My newest laptop had died, and I transferred all of my telescope control programs over to an old laptop that was barely hanging on.  I didn’t know if this improvised setup would work or not.

The Barn Owl called again, this time louder.  It had moved along the tree line, up the hill and closer to our house.  Barn owls are by far the rarest of the four species of owls that we've had on our farm.  We’ve seen one in our barn, and heard just a few in the 18 years we’ve been here.

It called again.  This time the sound was much louder and I knew it was flying towards me.  It called once more, somewhere in the darkness overhead, and then the calls grew fainter.  I decided that even if I didn’t get an image of a galaxy, this Barn Owl had already made my evening a good one.

After placing a black plastic bag over the laptop, I left the telescope to its imaging run.  It performed flawlessly all night long, imaging until dawn, and then did just as well the next evening until clouds finally drew the curtain around midnight.

Sometimes good luck comes on the wings of a Barn Owl.

 

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