The Moon and Venus

I’m just wrapping up the Astronomical League’s Lunar Observing Program with two observations to see the Moon within 72 and the 48 hours of new. Photos are not required but why not?

Here in descending order are the Moon and Venus and the Moon from Wednesday the 18th when the Moon was 32 hours from new and then the same from Tuesday when it was 52 hours from new. See how thin the Moon is and if you double click either picture with Venus and you can see it’s gibbous phase.
 

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.


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.

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