Solar System Archives - Page 16 of 24

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.

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.

October 28, 2016December 16, 2020

Mars and the Teapot (short and stout)

I used my Canon Rebel tonight to do some simple astrophotography. It was connected to my Nexstar mount for tracking and running BackyardEOS on the laptop to control it. After spending quite some time manually focusing and trying different ISOs and exposures I settled on ISO 1600 and 30 seconds. It was supposed to be clear but there were thin clouds all over. The bright “star” on the left is Mars and if you look closely in the lower left quadrant you’ll see the teapot of Sagitarrius. I was also hoping to capture the nova currently in Sagitarrius just above the spout and if I zoom in I can see a star right where the nova is but it’s none too impressive.