Fireflies Mean Summer is Officially Here

This has been a busy year for me personally, so I haven't had a chance to take my telescope out as often. Though recently I saw one of my old firefly photos pop up in my history and thought I should try that again.

I've heard fireflies are struggling to survive, like so many other insects, so I was curious if they were still in my yard.

I took a 15 minute video in my backyard starting from the moment I saw the first firefly. I then converted the video into ~25,000 individual frames using a python script I wrote for other projects. Finally, I dumped all those images into StarStax to create a fake time lapse image.

Seeing fireflies always makes me so happy. I didn’t capture quite as many as I did last year, but I’m hoping that's just a factor of the day, the weather, or whatever and not part of a larger trend.

Looking into this made me research how to help fireflies, and apparently they like wet leaf piles to reproduce in, so from now on I'm not clearing all my yards leaves! Save the fireflies!