Venus & Jupiter & Crescent Moon

I told you! We got one last clear sunset to see Venus (at the bottom), Jupiter (at the top), and the 12% illuminated, three-day old crescent Moon before this cold, snowy storm moves into SoCal.

Stunning! This is using a hand-held iPhone in 30-gusting-to-40+ winds.

Using the big camera on a tripod there was a little less shaking and bouncing.

And close-up on the Moon and Jupiter. I was hoping to get a picture that showed a couple of Jupiter’s moons (three of the Galilean moons were visible) but with the wind, longer exposures look like modern art, not astrophotography.

You’ve got a day or two to see this with the Moon hanging around and a week to watch Jupiter and Venus get closer to each other. The closest approach will be March 1st. Then you have weeks to watch them pull apart. If you get a couple minutes after sunset and it’s clear, go take a few minutes to gander at our corner of the Universe!

That cold storm is definitely on its way. It was pushing 80º yesterday – tonight it was 43º headed to a low of 38º and with the wind the wind chill was right around freezing.

As for that even weirder weather headed our way, it’s a weather pattern that’s rare so there’s not a lot of baseline information in the computer models. For our location there’s still a chance of up to an inch of snow, but only down (as of the latest) to about 1,500 feet. Castle Peak (see in the bottom right of that first picture above) might get some snow on the top, as might the Santa Monica Mountains, south of us between the San Fernando and Conejo Valleys and the coast around Malibu. If we don’t have snow, we’ll get something on the order of 5″ of rain between now and Monday, so either way it’s going to be fun.