Archive Planets

The Moon and Venus Show #2


Tonight’s close encounter of Moon and Venus.

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The Moon and Venus Show


Tonight, the Moon and Venus are getting close, but tomorrow they will be closer!

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Jupiter and Moons – December 2015 Edition


This is not really a good photo, but more an experiment I tried several times before: can a Canon Powershot SX1 bridge camera pick up Jupiter’s moons? Yes, it can – they may be blurry, but you can definitely see all four Galilean Moons on this photo made on January 1 at about 2:15am. Jupiter itself is grossly overexposed and the camera is not even able to resolve any detail from the planet, but it’s still astonishing that it is possible to pick up the Galilean Moons with it.

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New Year Moon-Jupiter Conjunction


After the smoke from the fireworks had cleared, so had the sky and we were treated to a nice conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter – which, as always, looked much more awesome seen with your own eyes than in this photo. This was a great way to start the new year!

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Jupiter & Venus Conjunction


Jupiter and Venus are appearing very close together in the sky at the moment and yesterday, we were able to actually see the two planets together. I was only able to take this photo through the fly net on the kitchen window, which left some interesting artifacts, but even the distinct shape of the Venus phase at the moment is clearly visible. Usually I don’t even get them together in one camera frame and this is a 1600×1065 crop from a 10 megapixel original, so they are already really close!

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One Moon, One Planet


We had a wonderful view of the crescent Moon and Venus appearing together in the western sky this evening. The photo doesn’t really do it justice, but you can even see a bit of earthshine on the Moon.

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Jupiter and Moons – December 2014 Edition


I did this once before in January with the old camera to answer the question if it’s possible to pick up Jupiter’s moons – and yes, it works. This new capture with the SX1 from yesterday shows all four Galilean moons, from bottom left to top right, Europa, Io, Ganymede and, very faint, Callisto. There are, of course, no surface details on Jupiter visible and the size of the planet is blown up too much because I had to overexpose the image to get the moons to show up, but it’s still amazing to see that the camera can pick up objects with magnitudes between 5 and 6!

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Jupiter and Moons


Can you pick up Jupiter’s moons with an old digital bridge camera? It turns out you can: this is a 100% crop of an 8 megapixel image from my Canon Powershot S5 at 12x zoom – while the camera is not able pick up details from Jupiter’s cloud bands, all four galilean moons are distinctly visible here. It’s by no means a pretty shot, but it’s still amazing that it’s possible at all – this is another planet in our solar system with its moons! This was photographed on January 12th at about 19:00 CET.

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Mond & Jupiter


Gestern Abend: eine Begegnung von Mond und Jupiter.
(Ja, der kleine Punkt rechts oben ist wirklich ein Planet :-).

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Mond & Jupiter


Eigentlich wollte ich zwischen den Feiertagen nichts posten, aber am 25. hat das Mistwetter mal kurz Pause gemacht und einen Blick auf die Mond-Jupiter-Konjunktion ermöglicht – der kleine Etwas ganz oben im Bild ist tatsächlich ein Planet! Es ist nicht mein bestes Astronomiefoto des Jahres, aber immerhin…

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