Greeting the Sun

From time to time a trail camera will record some rather spectacular stuff.  That's the nature of something that sits outdoors year after year, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.  Eventually the law of large numbers and averages along with a bit of random luck works to one's advantage.

A couple of months ago I positioned a camera facing due east on an ash tree about a foot above the turf.  The field of view is a mowed trail that extends the width of the property - a quarter mile.  In this case the camera is sited approximately midway on the trail.

Dense forest extends to either side of the trail so it is natural that anything the runs, crawls, walks or flies is going to possibly make use of the trail.  The wildlife photos have been many and varied.  In this case I even captured an astronomical event - an ordinary sunrise with spectacular results.

The extent of the photos spans eighteen minutes total from the beginning to the denouement.  For brevity I've only chosen a handful of the photos representative of the progression.  It's rather cool - and excepting for cropping the date and time stamp - no retouching...