Tuesday 24 February 2015

Mars and Venus conjunction of Saturday Oct 21, 2015

Here are a couple of photos of the Mars-Venus conjunction, this past weekend (Sat Oct 21, 201).  Actually, they are the same photo, but magnified (X2 and X8).  Venus is the brighter one, and Mars is the smaller, dimmer one, at about 2 o'clock from Venus (up and to the right).  I couldn't actually make out Mars with my naked eye at the time that I took the photo.  Maybe later, when it got a little darker, though Mars would have set pretty early in the evening, anyway.

This was just done with a simple automatic digital camera on a tripod, through a fairly small telescope finder scope.  The Earth moves a bit during the exposure, and the tripod didn't have tracking, so the planets blur a bit.

There is some interesting astrophysics in this picture, but I will save that for a later blog.  For now, this is just (sort of) pretty picture time.




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