Astrophotography Archives - Page 52 of 61

February 26, 2017December 16, 2020

Venus and Mars 2/25/2017

I was able to take these images of Venus and Mars Saturday night. The goal was Venus with Mars being way past its last opposition of about 9 months ago and now only about 3 arc seconds across.Venus on the other hand is close to one arc minute across and will only get larger for a few weeks before passing under the Sun and entering the morning sky. Venus was shot with a red filter and even so each frame was a quarter of a millisecond. It was the best 20% of 10,000 frames. Mars was best 20% of 5,000 frames with no filter and each frame was one millisecond. Last night Mars was about 6 magnitudes (or 225x) dimmer than Venus. Both were low in the west and seeing conditions were awful. Also seen but not imaged was Uranus, which was pretty close to Mars.

February 10, 2017December 16, 2020

Penultimate Eclipse of the Moon

That sounds better than Penumbral Eclipse of the Moon which is more accurate. I was on my way out the door when I saw and remembered the eclipse so I ran back in for the camera. I was surprised about how easy it was to see this non-umbral eclipse. That said, look to the upper left near the Mare Frigorus area. That looks darker there. I don’t know how close the umbra came tonight but its easy to imagine it’s right there off the edge of the Moon.

January 31, 2017December 16, 2020

Moon, Mars, and Venus 1/31/2017

Here’s a picture of the left to right from this evening. The Moon and Venus are, respectively, always the second and third brightest objects in the sky not counting occasional supernova. Mars on the other hand gets really bright for a couple months every two years and then fades to relative obscurity. So it is here. The Moon is about 500 times brighter than Venus and Venus is perhaps 100 times brighter than Mars right now. For this picture, I used a regular DSLR with a 300mm lens set to 6400 ISO and a 1/80th second exposure. That was the shortest exposure that showed Mars and while longer exposures showed the ruddy color of Mars they also blew out the Moon and Venus. So, I had to compromise.