Metamorphosis

Today our little chrysalis changed color from bright green to almost black, which means a newly minted monarch butterfly is about to emerge. I've set up my son's Digital Blue microscope to take a frame every 10 seconds, so that we can capture the emergence even if it happens when we're asleep.

That's the exciting news from here. That, and I am now the third member of my family to get the cold that's making the rounds.

UPDATE: Exclusive video! It's grainy, it's out of focus -- limitations of the camera -- but here is time-lapse video of the butterfly emerging from its chrysalis (5MB AVI file). The time-lapse was a frame every 10 seconds; the video plays back at 15 frames per second, so we slowed time down by a factor of 150. If I had to do it again, I'd use a much smaller delta t. The actual emergence took about five minutes -- only about 2 seconds of the time-lapse video.