Gallery

These two pages display some astronomical images taken by ASNH members.

Early summer conjunction of Venus and Jupiter

In late June and early July 2015, Venus and Jupiter met in the evening sky in an unusually close conjunction. Richard LaPlante captured two views of this event on two different nights. The image below, taken on June 29, shows trails of very bright Venus in the center and Jupiter and its moons to the upper left. This was a single 8-second exposure using a tripod-mounted Canon 1DS Mark III camera at full frame (21 MB), at ISO 800 and f8, through a Canon zoom lens at 400 mm. The raw image was processed in Photoshop 6 and heavily cropped. This was done without using any tracking or image stacking.

LaPlante’s second picture was taken with the same equipment on July 4 at a much shorter exposure of 1/8 second and ISO 400. By this time, the planets had switched their relative positions, with Venus now to the left of Jupiter. When this picture was taken, Europa was eclipsed by Jupiter, but the other three moons are visible and labeled (C = Callisto, I = Io, G = Ganymede).  Below the full image is an enlarged section that shows Jupiter and its moons more clearly.