Venus and Jupiter dancing in the evening sky

As Venus and Jupiter were getting very close together this past week, it's been cloudy in Tucson and I only got a brief hazy glimpse of them about 5 days ago.  Tonight on my way home, though, I was treated to the pair dancing in the western sky as well as the Moon rising in the east.  When I got home, I pulled out my Canon 70D along with my 70-200 f/2.8L lens and took some shots.  Here, I've backed the lens off to 70mm focal length to get the surrounding trees and stars.  A little adjustment in the GIMP brought out more details in the sky and a bit of sharpening helped show off structure in the trees.  This exposure was at 70mm focal length with an exposure of 2 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 1600.

Venus-Moon-Mercury

I was out in the Tucson Mountains last night taking pictures of the celestial show in the western sky, namely Venus, the Moon and Mercury.  Got a late start and almost missed Mercury!

The Earthshine-lit Moon was very pretty and Venus is off to its left with Mercury near the horizon almost straight below the Moon.  An airplane is visible slightly streaked at the left edge of the image.  This image was taken with my Canon 70D with my 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II lens at 70mm focal length with an exposure of 2 seconds at f/4, ISO 800.

Venus Transit, 2012 June 5

I watched the Venus transit from the UofA mall in front of the Lunar and Planetary Lab where quite a few folks were set up to watch the event.  Here, some grad students set up a "Sunspotter" which worked really well, allowing a small group to watch the event simultaneously (while through telescopes, only one person could view the sun at a time).

Zooming in on the image of the sun, you can see Venus on the right side of this image (which is roughly correct N-S, but flipped E-W so Venus is actually on the NE part of the sun), just about to finish transiting onto the face of the sun about 20 minutes after the start of the transit.

A bit later, I had the opportunity to look through a telescope with an H-alpha filter which showed some prominences, sunspots and lots of other phenomena along with the silhouetted Venus.

KGUN-9 weatherperson Erin Christiansen was on site as well. Here, she talks to my friend Dean Ketelsen who had set up a couple of telescopes for visitors to look through.

Here a young girl looks through one of the small telescopes.

Venus was big enough to see as a small speck on the sun even with just a pair of solar viewing glasses as this young lady demonstrates:

I borrowed a larger solar viewing filter that fit over my 75-300 zoom lens and took this shot just holding the filter over the lens.  Focusing and setting the exposure were both challenging.  For reference, this was heavily cropped from the original frame shot at 300mm focal length with an exposure of 1/500 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 400.

Venus, the Plieades and zodiacal light.

Shortly after watching the ISS fly over a couple nights ago, I turned the camera west to capture this view of the planet Venus (the brightest star visible) right next to the Plieades star cluster. Also visible is the broad bright band of light extending from the horizon up past Venus which is the Zodiacal light from scattered dust in the inner solar system. This image was taken at 24mm focal length with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 400.