Alnitak,Alnilam and Mintaka

Well, you must be thinking of the post name...Orion's Belt or the Belt of Orion, also known as the Three Kings or Three Sisters, is a  asterism in the constellation Orion. It consists of the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

Looking for Orion's Belt in the night sky is the easiest way to locate Orion in the sky. The stars are more or less evenly spaced in a straight line, and so can be visualized as the Belt of the hunter's clothing. They are best visible in early night sky during the Northern Winter/Southern Summer, in particular the month of january  at around 9:00 pm.

What do you know about spiders?

Spiders are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs and chelicerae with fangs that inject venom. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all other ordersof organisms. Spiders are found worldwide on every continent except for Antarctica, and have become established in nearly every habitat with the exceptions of air and sea colonization. As of September 2015, at least 45,709 spider species, and 114 families have been recorded by taxonomists.A herbivorous species, Bagheera kiplingi, was described in 2008,but all other known species are predators, mostly preying on insects and on other spiders, although a few large species also take birds and lizards. Spiders use a wide range of strategies to capture prey: trapping it in sticky webs, lassoing it with sticky bolas, mimicking the prey to avoid detection, or running it down. Most detect prey mainly by sensing vibrations, but the active hunters have acute vision, and hunters of the genus Portia show signs of intelligence in their choice of tactics and ability to develop new ones. Spiders' guts are too narrow to take solids, and they liquidize their food by flooding it with digestive enzymes and grinding it with the bases of their pedipalps, as they do not have true jaws.

Male spiders identify themselves by a variety of complex courtship rituals to avoid being eaten by the females. Males of most species survive a few matings, limited mainly by their short life spans. Females weave silk egg-cases, each of which may contain hundreds of eggs. Females of many species care for their young, for example by carrying them around or by sharing food with them. A minority of species are social, building communal webs that may house anywhere from a few to 50,000 individuals. Social behavior ranges from precarious toleration, as in the widow spiders, to co-operative hunting and food-sharing. Although most spiders live for at most two years,tarantulas and other mygalomorph spiders can live up to 25 years in captivity.

Benefits to humans

The Ch'ol Maya use a beverage created with the tarantula species Brachypelma vagans for the treatment of a condition they term 'tarantula wind', the symptoms of which include chest pain, asthma and coughing.Spider venoms may be a less polluting alternative to conventional pesticides as they are deadly to insects but the great majority are harmless to vertebrates. Australian funnel web spiders are a promising source as most of the world's insect pests have had no opportunity to develop any immunity to their venom, and funnel web spiders thrive in captivity and are easy to "milk". It may be possible to target specific pests by engineering genes for the production of spider toxinsinto viruses that infect species such as cotton bollworms.

Possible medical uses for spider venoms are being investigated, for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia,Alzheimer's disease, strokes,and erectile dysfunction. The peptide GsMtx-4, found in the venom of Brachypelma vagans; is being researched to determine whether or not it could effectively be used for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia,muscular dystrophy or glioma. Because spider silk is both light and very strong, attempts are being made to produce it in goats' milk and in the leaves of plants, by means of genetic engineering.

Spiders can also be used as food. Cooked tarantula spiders are considered a delicacy in Cambodia, and by the Piaroa Indians of southern Venezuela – provided the highly irritant hairs, the spiders' main defense system, are removed first. 

A human sized spider's web can even stop a Jumbo Jet

Arachnophobia

Arachnophobia is a specific phobia—it is the abnormal fear of spiders or anything reminiscent of spiders, such as webs or spider-like shapes. It is one of the most common specific phobias, and some statistics show that 50% of women and 10% of men show symptoms. It may be an exaggerated form of an instinctive response that helped early humans to survive,or a cultural phenomenon that is most common in predominantly European societies.

Honey!

It was a summery afternoon I was sitting in my garden having high tea. Suddenly I could hear a buzzing. I took out my camera and started clicking. But while taking the pic I realized that how much time does it take for a bee to make an adequate amount of honey.

Production Of Honey
Honey is produced by bees as a food source. To produce about 500 grams of honey, foraging honey bees have to travel the equivalent of three times around the world. In cold weather or when fresh food sources are scarce, bees use their stored honey as their source of energy. By contriving for bee swarms to nest in artificial hives, people have been able to semidomesticate the insects and harvest excess honey. Honey bees transform saccharides into honey by a process of regurgitation, a number of times, until it is partially digested. The bees do the regurgitation and digestion as a group. After the last regurgitation, the aqueous solution is still high in water, so the process continues by evaporation of much of the water and enzymatic transformation.

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The Great Cattle Race of the farms of West Bengal

It was onset of monsoon and the cattle race festival is the most important festival to celebrate for the farmers. the festival is held for good monsoon and better yield. After a 3 hours journey in motorcycle from Kolkata to Jalabaria where the festival will happen. I reached the village and everyone seemed to crowd around a filed. I went closer only to find out the final race of the festival. It was a great race where the owner of the cows slides on the water in a wooden plank connected to three cows at a time. It signifies the great heritage in our farmlands and the people tend to live every moment despite the various hardships faced by the farmers.

Architecture

Frisson De La Vitesse. The Art Of Panning.

What is Panning?
The Art Of Panning.

Panning is the horizontal movement of a camera as it scans a moving subject.

And since someone out there who’s mind is permanently blocked to technical jargon, as mine is, there was bound to be a “huh?” or two.  So let me break it down a bit. 

When you pan you’re moving your camera in synchronicity with your subject as it moves parallel to you.  Still a little wordy huh? It’s not as complicated as it sounds.  Shake your head “no.” Go on and do it.  Now cut that in half and pretend like you’re moving you head along with a cheetah as is it flies by and you’ve got the idea. In order to pan successfully your camera has got to follow the subject’s movement and match it’s speed and direction as perfectly as possible.

Proper panning implies motion. However, panning creates the feeling of motion and speed without blurring the subject as a slow shutter speed sans panning would tend to do.  Take for example the two images below.  The first is an example of panning.  Notice how the car is clear and crisp but the rest of the image is blurred to show the motion of the vehicle.  This effect was achieved by panning.

Now check out the second image.  This is an example of a slow shutter speed (which panning also requires by the way) without the panning of the camera.  Because the camera was held static, the moving object, in this case the train, depicts the motion while the area around it is static.

Is one image better than the other?  Maybe, maybe not, it’s certainly a matter of preference. Both static shots employing slow shutter speeds and panning images have their place and time and it’s up to you as the discerning photographer to decide which you’d like to employ in any given situation.

1.  Panning requires a steady hand and a relatively slow shutter speed.

The actual shutter speed depends on the speed of the subject but generally it will be 1/200th or slower. 1/200th if your subject is really flying along, like a speeding car on a race track, and maybe as slow as 1/40th of a second if your subject is a runner on a track.

2.  Keep in mind that the faster your shutter speed is the easier it will be to keep your subject crisp.

Especially as you’re learning the art of panning, don’t slow your shutter down too much.  Just keep it slow enough to begin to show some motion.  As your confidence increases and you’ve got the hang of things, go ahead and slow your shutter more and more to show even further pronounced motion and thus separation of your speeding subject from the background.

3.  Make sure your subject remains in the same portion of the frame during the entire exposure:  this will ensure a crisp, sharp subject.

4. Remember that the faster your subject is moving the more difficult it will be to pan.

This point goes right along with number 3.  It’s harder to keep your subject in the same portion of the frame if it’s moving faster than you are able to.  So again, start with something a little slower and then progress from there.

Great Gig in the sky!

With a fully packed crowd all staring at us with curiosity. "What are they gonna play"? "How will they play"? "Are they a new band in this town"?. I didn't find courage to look into the eyes of the crowd. Suddenly we were called for our 1st gig. It was quite popular venue in the town and it is a stage where new aspiring rockers start their journey. As I entered the front stage from the back area it was like total silence. It felt like as if they were staring at me for a big time crime. We checked our sounds and I took a breathe breathe and started with a Power Riff. it sounded like Symphony o me and i was lost into the music. I forgot about my stage fright. Just after my face melting solos it was the ending lines of the song. And I was shocked to see the crowd. It could see many horn lifted up along with a gut-busting mosh-pit. That was the day which I could see the power of music and the influence it has on me.

Fishing a rich industry yet fishermen are struck below poverty line.

After couple of days of heavy rainfall its a sunny day. It is perhaps a good news for a bunch of local fishermen. They earn their from from fishing. But due to heavy rainfall it becomes difficult for them to go out in the water with their wooden manually driven boat. Its an old boat which looks really scary for a boat which goes out for fishing. Its wood has becomes old and looks weak. But it doesn't matter for the fishermen as they have no options beside that old boat. The saddest part is that the boat belongs to a different owner who doesn't go out for fishing. He just gives the boat on rent. The deal behind the rent is that whatever fishes are caught the half goes to the owner of the boat and the rest is shared by the bunch of fishermen. Due to their poor state they are helpless and are ready to pay that much of share to the owner of that boat. They have lost self motivation and self respect. When I heard their story tears came out of my eye and I wish anything We to could do to educate and increasing their level of self motivation.

The ride that changed evrything.

It was March 2015 i was sitting uselessly in my crib.. Suddenly I saw my motorcycle all covered in dust. I went closer to it and decided to clean it. While doing so I thought as thought to myself that as i am doing nothing now so I should go on a journey on my motorcycle. I took off on my journey after a while and rode for 8 hours straight. Than I reached a small village. They were all looking and staring at my biker attire very strangely. As if  it was new to them. I had some snacks and tea in a shack there in the village and again went ahead with my journey. Then again I rode for another 6 hours and went even further from any cities or urban civilization. It was a very remote village with no electricity, no roads not even basic human necessities like running water, education health facilities etc. I talked to the local people and most of them didn't even know the name of their country where their village is. it was way shocking for me. They don't even know if there are other places besides their village cause they never went out of their village. It was a very saddening moment for me as the people in that village are isolated and separated from proper civilization. But they were really happy in their villages as they didnt have any social class difference among them. This was the ride which I could never forget.