Triple Conjunction

Posted on 02 December 2008 · 864 views · 441 words.

Curiously, I was completely ignorant about yesterday’s triple conjunction until a Tweet from Space_Jockey inadvertently alerted me to the event. I started following Space_Jockey (who also has a blog) after he won my Universe DVD giveaway in October. He takes some really nice pictures. Anyway, I’m blathering.

Walking home, I noticed the sky was clear and so waited until a break in the buildings allowed me to see the Moon and Jupiter. I couldn’t see Venus at all, which meant it was behind the Moon. ‘Rather, cool’, I thought and took some snaps with my iPhone. Cameraphones never work on the Moon, yet I never seem to learn my lesson.

It takes me half an hour to walk home, and when I got there I could just see Venus emerging from the edge of the Moon. It was quite lovely. I grabbed our Digital SLR and set off around the streets near my house. I was running out of time and forgot to take the telescopic zoom so what I ended up with was lots of fairly widefield image sof the triple conjunction.

As you can see, I am no astrophotographer (in fact we’ve been through this before on Orbiting Frog). My tiny tripod required using the roof of whatever cars were nearby to see the triple conjunction but I am pretty pleased with the results.

I also took this bizarre but cool picture of the streetlights around my house. I was playing with the exposure time and accidentally took this 30 second exposure, which is now my desktop wallpaper.

Dave Mosher, over at Discovery Space wants people to send in their images of the event to form part of a Discovery Space Gallery.

This post was written by:

ttfnRob - who has written 492 posts on Orbiting Frog.

I am studying for my PhD in Astronomy at Cardiff University in the UK. Star formation is my main area of research but really I like anything to do with space, science and the internet.

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2 Comments For This Post

  1. Ewan says:

    Brilliant picture! I really enjoy seeing the pictures that other people take of an event like this. Your psychedelic ‘lightscape’ is pretty cool too!

  2. Stephen says:

    We had snow, so i didn’t even get the camera out. One of the guys at the astronomy club meeting fired up a planetarium program on his laptop, put it on the video projector and showed us what we might be seeing, if we could see it.

    I’ve gotten out once this past month. The skies have gotten as good as pretty crappy around Detroit.

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