Tag: Photography

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Boys Whale Be Boys by James Penha

humpbacks copulate
in photos for the first time—
out of the closet

by James Penha

The world’s first photographs of humpback whales copulating are even more groundbreaking because both individuals were male.

Further reading:

‘An observation of sexual behavior between two male humpback whales’, 2024, Stack, S.H., Krannichfeld, L. & Romano, B., Marine Mammal Science. Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.13119

‘Humpback Whale Sex Observed for the First Time Ever, between Two Males’, 2024, Hobson, M., Scientific American. Available: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humpback-whale-sex-observed-for-the-first-time-ever-between-two-males/

Author bio:

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him 🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about James’ poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on Twitter @JamesPenha

Enjoyed James’ sciku? Check out more of his sciku here: ‘Quantumku’, ‘DNAncient’ and ‘If a Tree Talks in a Forest’, and ‘Air-Gen-Ku ‘.

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Universal truth by John Norwood

Photograph stitches
Global perspective binding
Universal truth

By John Norwood

This sciku was inspired by the first images of a black hole captured by astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope. The black hole is found at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87, 55 million light years from earth and the image required collaboration between over 200 astronomers.

The poem is a reflection on how an image created by collating observations from various locations all over the earth gives us insight on the physical nature of the universe. 

Image of black hole Messier 87 captured by the Event Horizon Telescope. Credit: EHT Collaboration.

You can read more about the image and find references to the 6 papers here: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/

John Norwood is a Mechanical Engineer working with Carbon, Inc. to revolutionize how things are made. His interests include old houses, yoga, baking, cryptography, and bluegrass music. You can follow him on Twitter under the handle @pryoga

Enjoyed this sciku? Check out some of John’s other work: The answer is none, God may be defined, With enough data, Rivers cut corners, and Squeamish ossifrage.

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Fatal Attraction by Fred Mason

Sundew enticement.
Sweet nectar beyond compare.
Come hither, dear midge.

By Fred Mason

Philippe Martin revolutionized digital nature photography by “stacking” multiple images of the same subject to create a single, startlingly focused image. The resulting sharpness and brilliance create an almost three-dimensional quality. His book Hyper Nature (Firefly Books, 2015) advances the study of nature’s smallest creatures. The image which inspired this haiku shows a small (3 mm) midge, Anthomyia pluvialus, trapped in a sundew.

About the author:

My name is Fred Mason. I spent 37 years working for IBM Corporation. After retiring, I embarked on several new activities, including the writing of poetry. Most recently, I have written many Hiakus. My approach is to start with an exceptional photo, then to give it a voice of its own. My range of subjects runs the gamut from Comedy Wildlife Animals, to weird and unusual scenes (sculptures, buildings, nature, etc.).

Editor’s note: This is actually the first image featured on The Sciku Project. I very much enjoy Fred’s approach to writing haiku and am so pleased to have been able to feature his poem and the image that inspired it. The image is from Hyper Nature by Philippe Martin, published by Firefly books, you can find more about it here.

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Star evolution

Increased shutter speed
proves stellar structure theory.
Star evolution.

The stellar structure model describes the internal structure of a star. Now researchers have validated this model by taking photos of a cool subdwarf star using a high-speed camera, allowing them to predict the star’s future evolution.

Rebessa-Mansergas et al (2019) used HiPERCAM, a camera mounted on the Gran Telescopio Canarias on the island of La Palma. The camera is able to take a photo in five different colours simultaneously every millisecond (compared to every few minutes), allowing the researchers to get precise measurements of the star’s mass and radius – both validating the stellar structure model for the first time and allowing the researchers to forecast the star’s evolution.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0746-7