The evening sky has provided opportunities in February and early March to view several planets grouped together. In mid February there was an alignment of four planets and one asteroid: Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Vesta. Only two of these were visible with the unaided eye but even a short exposure on a camera showed the other three objects. Okay…some of them were still hard to see.
The evening sky with four planets and an asteroid: Venus, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Vesta (19 February 2023).Zodiacal Light and airglow.
A short time later the Zodiacal Light became prominent along with some faint airglow bands near the horizon.
Venus and Jupiter in the evening twilight sky.Venus and Jupiter in the evening twilight sky. A waxing Moon illuminated both the foreground meadow and the peaks in the distance.
In early March the planets Venus and Jupiter were very near each other in the evening sky. Cloudy skies prevented me from getting photographs at their closest approach but a few days later I was able to capture these images from Bonito Park near Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument.
The past few weeks have offered numerous opportunities for photographing objects in the twilight and night sky.
Venus and Mercury in the evening sky.
Above is a photograph showing the planets Venus (visible near the top of the image) and Mercury (located just below the center of the image). The glow of evening twilight on the horizon is reflected in the shallow waters of Mormon Lake.
Four planets and an asteroid.
Taken later on the same evening is a photograph showing four planets and an asteroid in a single frame. This was taken with a 24mm focal length lens to capture these solar system objects (SSO). I did this as a fun test to see if a wide-angle lens was able to capture these dim and distant SSOs. From top to bottom are the asteroid Vesta, Uranus, Venus, Neptune, and Mercury.
Zoomed-in crops (below) show the dimmer objects that are in the image above.
Zoomed in crops showing Vesta, Uranus, and Neptune.
Before leaving that night I did a final wide-angle shot of the southeastern sky which included the constellation Orion as well as a portion of the winter Milky Way.
Wide-angle view of Orion and Milky Way.Pleiades star cluster.
The following night I was out again to test my recently purchased Nikon 180mm ƒ/2.8 ED AIS manual focus lens. A few previous tests have shown that star images are pretty good at an aperture of ƒ/2.8 but much better at ƒ/4. At ƒ/2.8 there is just a hint of star spikes; at ƒ/4 they are quite prominent. This is a stacked sequence of images of the Pleiades star cluster. Image stacking was done with Starry Sky Stacker; histogram stretching was done with rnc-color-stretch.
Occultation of Mars.
On 18 February there was a Lunar occultation of the planet Mars. I had planned to get up early and drive to a dark location but an alarm failure meant I barely had time to get up and set up the gear on the rear deck of the house to start the sequence. Luckily, Flagstaff is a Dark Sky City and it was dark enough to get the shots. This is a sequence from just a few minutes before the Moon moved in front of Mars followed by a longer sequence after it reappeared.
Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)
Finally, Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) is in the northern sky making it an easy target—except that it is still very dim with a magnitude of about +12 at the time of this image. The still image is a stack of 49 images each 120 seconds duration at ISO 1600, 180mm, and ƒ/2.8. As noted above this lens is pretty good at ƒ/2.8 but better at ƒ/4. Because the comet is so dim I wanted the maximum light gathering ability so settled for an aperture of ƒ/2.8. Also in the image is M97 (“Owl Nebula”) and M108 (“Surfboard Galaxy”). The star Merak is part of the “Big Dipper.”
Also, there is an animation—made from the same images—showing the movement of the comet over a period of just under 2 hours.
In late January, the easily visible planet Venus was located in the same part of the evening sky as the dimmer and distant planet Neptune. I’ve never tried to photograph Neptune but this pairing of the planets was a good reason to do so.
Venus and Neptune in the evening sky (2020-01-28).
The first attempt was taken on the evening of 27 January (shown below) and I was limited to very short exposures as I was using a standard tripod. The second attempt was the following night from a better location and, more importantly, I was using my equatorial mount star tracker so that I could follow the stars (or planets) for longer exposures.
The image at the top is the second attempt. High, thin cirrus clouds were beginning to move in from the west and I was hoping that the clouds might make some of the stars more colorful. What I got was an amazing corona surrounding the very bright planet Venus while stars and the dimmer Neptune appeared relatively unchanged.
Venus and Neptune in the evening sky (2020-01-27).
The image above is from the first night of shooting and shows diffraction spikes around Venus. Examing these two images you can easily see how far Venus has moved in one night by comparing the position of Phi Aquarii.
