Earlier this week (13 November 2017) there was an opportunity to view a conjunction of the planets Venus and Jupiter in the pre-dawn sky. Venus is the brightest planet in the sky while Jupiter is the second brightest (and, of course, the largest). Pairings of these two planets in either the morning or evening sky are always an amazing sight. At closest approach, the distance separating the two planets was less than the diameter of the full moon. Jupiter was rising a bit higher each morning while Venus was dropping closer to the horizon.

For three mornings I shot photos of the morning sky. I then took the images from each day and created a layered image. Next, I shifted each image up/down, left/right until the planet Jupiter lined up. The result was that the composite contains a single image of Jupiter along with three images of Venus. This makes it easy to see how the two planets were shifting relative to each other over the course of three days.

But the show wasn’t over, yet. The waning moon was dropping lower in the sky each morning and on 16 November was located just above the pair of planets. About 4% of the moon is directly illuminated by the sun; the remainder is illuminated by Earthshine.

The photos were taken from Mars Hill where Lowell Observatory is located and look over the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, the worlds first International Dark Sky City.

Other planetary conjunctions of Venus and Jupiter have appeared on these pages before (26 May 2013; 18 August 2014).