Category Archives: Astronomy

The clouds cleared!

When it was still dusk the two planets (Jupiter on the left, Venus on the right) the sky was still bright enough to require short exposures, which still showed the two BRIGHT planets like jewels in the sunset.

Throughout all of these pictures, especially the more close-up views like this one, “above” Jupiter you’ll easily see two other dots. These would be Callisto on top and Ganymede closer to Jupiter. (If you’re ever looking at Jupiter using binoculars or a small telescope and want to know which moon is which, try this free app on the Sky & Telescope website.)

Again, if you didn’t or couldn’t see this tonight, look tomorrow, or Saturday, or any day for the next couple of weeks. Jupiter will be going “down,” getting closer to the Sun from our viewpoint, and Venus will be going “up,” away from the Sun. They’ll be a little further from each other every day, but they’ll still be visible for several weeks.

After I filled the memory card on my camera at the good viewing site, I came back home to reload and then just went out into the front yard for more pictures.

A lot more lights interfering here, but even my iPhone 13 takes some really decent pictures of the event.

Even the wide-angle view looks impressive.

When I mention “Castle Peak” (which remains stubbornly non-snow-capped!), that’s it right there below the planets. It’s about a half-mile away as the raven flies.

I saw so many folks driving by on their way home from work and I wonder how many of them saw this amazing sight or paid any attention to it.

Finally, I dragged out the “light bucket” wide angle lens. Double click on this picture to see it full-sized. It’s spectacular!

There’s a lot of lens flares from all of the porch lights and the street lights just out of view to both the left and right. But this lens also gives me razor sharp focus, and there’s a LOT to see besides the two bright planets just above Castle Peak.

Look up at the top, just to the left of center. See that “V” shape of stars, with the top end star of the left arm being brighter and red? That star is Aldebaran and the constellation is Taurus.

Just to the lower right of that, about dead center, is a cluster of stars. Those are the Pleiades, M45.

I can’t wait to get this camera out to a dark sky location to see what it can do without all of those lights and lens flares!

It’s cold by LA standards (44º headed toward a low of about 37º – note that there are plenty of places up in the mountains which get much lower routinely because they can go up to over 10,000′) but the winds were down and the skies were clear (at least to the west, which is all that counts for this) so it was time for more pictures of the conjunction.

Jupiter’s on the top, Venus on the bottom.

They’re getting much closer together – compare to the pictures from four days ago.

With the 300mm lens I can’t QUITE get the focus sharp enough to see the planets as pinpoints and in turn see the Galilean moons near Jupiter. BUT, if you blow this picture up to full size you can see a dot just below Jupiter and another just at the top (more of a bump, just touching) which are Ganymede and Europa respectively.

Four days ago there was a crescent moon there. It’s moved on and is almost overhead, and about a quarter full. (Click on the photo to enlarge it to full sized, some nice detail there.)

As seen against the background stars, Venus is moving up and Jupiter is moving down. There’s nothing astronomically significant about a conjunction like this, it’s just a coincidence that happens periodically that the planets appear to be near each other from our position.

But it’s very pretty. They’ll be their closest on March 1st, four days from now. (I’m sure we’ll have more clouds between now and then.)

You should go see it if you can, it’s incredibly simple, a naked eye event. Find a cloudless evening about 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, look to the west. There they are!

Go admire the universe!