This weekend provided some fantastic planetary skywatching, and just for fun, I thought I’d share some attempts at astro-photography. All credit goes to my wife, whose Christmas present to me gave my inner nerd (who am I kidding – it’s not that “inner”) a better way to enjoy the night sky. There are three planets clearly visible right now in the evening sky, and I managed to get pictures of them all. I’ll save the best for the end of the post.
Venus
I love this, because you can see how Venus goes through phases like the moon as it rounds the sun. It’s getting closer to us, and as it does, it will get thinner and thinner. The pictures on the right (made with the software that came with my telescope) are how the planets actually appear at this time and location if I had a somewhat more powerful telescope.
Mars
Mars is very obviously red to the naked eye, and looked far redder through my eyepiece than my camera picked up. My camera is just a little aged point-and-click Canon I pointed through the eyepiece of the telescope. But in spite of that, I was really happy with how some of these turned out.
Jupiter and Friends
This is the one that really got me excited, although it was hard to keep the camera and the telescope simultaneously in focus, while the object is constantly moving in the eyepiece due to the rotation of Earth. But here they are!
I could actually see all four Galilean moons quite clearly, but it was hard to capture them with the camera. Here’s what you’re looking at (oriented slightly differently):
There are much fancier pictures out there of the wonders of our solar system, but there is nothing quite like seeing it with your own eyes in real life. And it’s amazing that I got to see all of these worlds in a single night, just in my own back yard.
What a wonderful thing, that we get to live our lives in such a wondrous universe. I can’t wait until the kids get old enough to geek out with me…
