On February 23, I posted a diary to the Backyard Science group about an upcoming conjunction of Jupiter, Venus, and the Moon. The diary described the appearance of the three in the western sky after sunset during the coming three weeks. Because of the rapid motion of Venus, and the less fast motion of Earth, it would appear that Jupiter and Venus would pass by and near to one another. It seemed like a photographic project was in order for the next three weeks.
Events like this are relatively easy to photograph. A tripod, manually adjustable camera, patience, and cooperative clear skies can come together to yield an interesting series of pictures. As each clear night happened, I got more hopeful for the next one. Here in the mid-west, getting clear skies during February and March is not common. This year was quite different. Twelve of the twenty one nights were clear enough to get a picture of good quality. I was thrilled that my project seemed like it was going to be successful.
Each clear evening between February 24th and March 18th, at about the same time, I walked over to my neighbor's driveway for an unobstructed view, away from the streetlight, and took a picture.
Join me below the squiggle for the results of my project.
The hyperlinked picture above is by Polish photographer Marek Nikodem. It was highlighted as the March 18th Astronomy Picture of the Day, a site well worth a bookmark. This link is for today's APoD to bookmark the site for a new picture each day.
My camera is a Fujifilm s602z that is several years old. It has a 6x optical zoom and 6Meg image quality on its highest TIFF setting. I like the many manual controls it has. I am used to the older cameras before everything went automatic. Therefore, I know how to use the manual settings to get what I want from a picture.
For each picture, the camera was placed on a tripod. The self-timer was used in order to avoid camera shake from my hand. The ISO was 200. White balance was incandescent bulb. Aperture was wide open at 2.8. Shutter speed was 1". I centered the camera on Venus each time. I focused manually.
Here is the first picture of the series taken on February 24th as the Moon was present. Jupiter is the tiny dot at the top left. Venus is just below center. The Moon was higher each of the next two nights.
In all, twelve separate photographs were taken. Each was converted into greyscale mode to make them present more uniformly in the final product. The pictures were cropped to 600x800 pixels. I tried to place Venus in the same place in each crop just below center.
I used a program called GifBuilder by Yves Piguet. It has been around for years. GifBuilder allows the individual images to be dragged into it to produce an animated gif. Controls let the user set the number of loops, duration of each frame, etc. I set the animated gif to loop infinitely. There is a three second delay between each of the frames of the gif. It starts with February 24th when the Moon was in the lower right. You will probably need to watch it cycle through a few times for the overall effect of the motions. I said before that I tried to place Venus in the same spot in each cropped frame. I didn't quite succeed at that. So, it jumps around a little. That's my fault. Venus doesn't actually do that.
After the project was completed, I wondered how the scene looked on my computer desktop planetarium. I use
Carina Software's Voyager III. It allows me to set the stage, if you will, by date, location, time, etc. A feature then allows a movie to be made. Below is the movie. It plays too fast. I couldn't slow it down more. But, it does show the unfolding of the conjunction event just as I witnessed it.
I was very happy with the outcome of my photographic project. Often, astronomy projects get stopped by cloudy weather or extreme cold in the winter here in IA. Not this year. It couldn't have been a better year for weather and skies.
My next project is the June transit of Venus in front of the Sun. That will be fun. Stay tuned.