No sunrise pictures from Stonehenge for me this year. First of all, there’s that whole “sunrise” and how damn early it is that I’m opposed to. On the other hand, if I were able to make it all the way to Stonhenge for the solstice, I suspect I’d find a way to scrape my sorry ass out of bed early enough to be there.
However, we did have a very pretty conjunction after sunset, starting with the three-day old crescent Moon and the very bright Venus.
A short exposure shows the crescent nicely and Venus is a pinpoint. If I had the telescope out, Venus would show the same crescent as the Moon. (It’s geometry.)
Crank up the exposure and Venus is overexposed but the Moon much more so. There are craters and plains and some details silhouetted at the terminator (the line between sunlight and darkness) but you see the dark portion of the moon dimly illuminated by “earthshine,” light reflected from the Sun off of the bright Earth.
Pull back a little and try to capture some details in the illuminated part of the moon, but I always forget just how stinking bright it is. Even though I had reset for a 1/250 second exposure, it’s still a bit overexposed. I should have gone down at least to 1/1000 second.
Pull back the zoom a little more and try again? Same mistake.
Pull all the way back on the zoom, overexpose for earthshine, and what else shows up? That thing just to the right of the palm trees that looks like a bright red planet? That’s a bright red planet, i.e., Mars.
As always, if you didn’t see this tonight, go look for it tomorrow night or Friday or Saturday. The Moon will be further up and to the left each night (for example, closer to Mars tomorrow) but you’ll still be able to see all of this if you have a clear western sky about an hour to two hours after sunset. Our forecast is for the June gloom to return with the coastal marine layer and fog moving back in, but we’ll see. Maybe the gods will cut us a break.
What does that Magic Eight Ball say? “Outlook not so good!”
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 