You never quite know when skies are going to cooperate on any given evening. Tonight, the stars (err… solar system objects) were in alignment. Checkout these shots of this evenings conjunction involving The Moon and The Planet Mercury. I’d actually forgotten about this alignment, and had to go home to get my camera and tripod. Around 8:30pm or so, I saw the crescent moon coming into view. I knew that Mercury couldn’t be far behind, but where would it appear. A quick peak at a sky map provided by Dr. Tony over at Spaceweather.com was all I needed. Back down the road (to my less obstructed western horizon) and 15 minutes later there was the first rock sitting just below and to the left.

I took a few shots with each lens to make sure that I’d have a good enough exposure to work with. I figured the wider field of view of the first shot made for a more neighborly feel. These are our nearest celestial neighbors, after all. The narrower field of view (I’d hoped) would show a bit more Earthshine. Alas, I needed a better view to the west to allow skies to further darken to capture this more distinctly. Oh, well….

Astro Photo Details:

* Designation: Conjunction: The Moon & Planet Mercury

Astro Photo Processing Details

* Canon Digital Rebel XTi
* Image #1 - wide view 1/8sec @ f5.6 ISO400 70mm focal length
* Image #2 - narrow view 1/10sec @ f/5.6 ISO800 200mm focal length
* Adobe PhotoShop CS2 Curves & Levels
* Neat Image

The impending snow storm has been delayed :-\  That was my realization when I got up this morning. Apparently, by quite a bit. Skies were crystal clear. As I looked out my front window, I noticed that the Moon and the planet Venus were sitting awfully close together (7* I read on Spaceweather.com). Sitting just above the duo was a bright star. Not fully caffeinated yet, I had to fire up Starry Night Pro to see that this was the bright star Spica in the constellation Virgo. Sweet. Groupings like this are called conjunctions and have held major significance throughout recorded history. That being the case, I figured I might as well put the camera on the tripod and see what I could come up with.

I ended up snagging a pair of images. The first shot shows the trio through the Canon Digital Rebel using a 75-30mm zoom lens. This nicely framed the scene. It also revealed a bit of detail on the lunar surface.

The second shot was with the 28-80mm lens pulled all the way back. This allowed me to get the mountains in the foreground. I exposed this shot for a full 10 seconds so that I got a nicely silhouetted mountain.

Astro Photo Details:

* Designation: The Moon
* Magnitude: roughly mag -12
* Size: roughly 1/2*

Astro Photo Processing Details

* Canon Digital Rebel XTi
* First 1/2s at ISO1600
* Second 10s at ISO1600
* Gimp Curves

I caught a sweet shot of The Moon and the red planet, Mars last night just before the clouds rolled in. The pair were separated by around 1* or so. This pairing is often referred to as a conjunction or alignment.

This was a more interesting image to process as the two are so far apart in brightness. The image I chose was a bright one (so that Mars would be visible). As such, the moon was a way washed out. To better deal with this, I created a duplicate layer in GIMP. This allowed me to process the two separately and then re-combine them later. For the moon, I used a number of Curves to dramatically reduce the overall brightness.  This revealed details on the lunar surface. For Mars, I used the Curves function to dramatically brighten the image. Not sure if this is cheating, but I took a copy of a black section and covered over the moon on this one. Otherwise, it was going to get brighter still. Finally, I selected just Mars and did an additional Curves and Levels function on just this object. This made Mars stand out significantly. Finally, I merged the two layers to create one nicely integrated image.

Astro Photo Details:

* Designation: The Moon
* Magnitude: roughly mag -12
* Size: roughly 1/2*

* Designation: Planet Mars
* Magnitude: mag -1.22
* Size: 15″

Astro Photo Processing Details

* Canon Digital Rebel XTi
* 1 x 1/2s exposure at ISO400
* Gimp Curves