Rare Conjunction

Luckily the sky was clear tonight, as looking into the western sky there appeared a beautiful and rare sight - a conjuction of the three brightest objects in the night sky: the Moon, Venus and Jupiter.

After Margaret and I had watched it for a few minutes we had a phone call from Michelle to tell us about it. I took a photograph of it but the result did not do the original justice.

Luckily there are people who are better photographers than me who published there efforts on the Web.

Here are three of them.



This was taken in Melbourne, by Gary Ayton, published at this site.


Gary describes the photo as follows:

I took the opportunity to play with my Canon 1DMIII with EF 24-105mm L lens from my letterbox.

For the tech heads, I removed the UV filter to minimise lens flare from the street light and the settings used were 24mm focal length, f/4, 3200ISO, 0.5sec exposure.

No post-processing, just resizing and compression for the web. Click on the image for a 1000 pixel wide view.

I also tried with an Olympus OM 21mm and 24mm lens but whilst both gave excellent results, they did have a more pronounced lens flare.

Of course, I could have moved over to the park and avoided the street light but I felt this added interest and lit up the foreground nicely.

Gary's site has some wonderful photographs, take a look!




This picture was displayed at the National Geographic site .



This photo was published at the Astronomy Picture of the Day site .

The following is a quote from the site:

Pictured above is the scene as it appeared from Mt. Wilson Observatory overlooking Los Angeles, California, USA after sunset on 2008 November 30

The crescent moon is obvious. The brighter planet to the left is Venus. It is relatively close to us. The last of the three, Jupiter, is on the other side of the sun, so although it is intrinsically the brightest of the three it is the least bright because of its greater distance.