Venus and the crescent moon over Santiago

Keep an eye out, the two will get even closer for the next couple of days.

See also the very nice shot from Twomanytribbles, complete with Earthshine and twighlight sky.

Observing Comet Lulin

Tomorrow Comet Lulin makes its closest approach to Earth and I have my alarm set for 5 tomorrow morning to try and get a glimpse of it. If you want to find where to look to find the comet then I can highly recommend downloading Stellarium, the best desktop skymap program I've found, by far. From this page, you can find the instructions on how to add Comet Lulin to the encyclopedia of objects in Stellarium. It's then very easy to find exactly where to locate it after you've input a few bits of data about your location.

Comet Lulin from the Nasa website:

Anyway, I'll be looking to get some photos tomorrow early morning and will post anything that is worth looking at. I stretched my camera and lens to their maxima last week by getting a photo of Venus in its half lit crescent state. While it's certainly not the greatest venus shot ever, it is nice to see what can be done without a telescope.

Photos of the Moon, Venus, Jupiter conjunction

Update: New photos below

We're not normally so lucky with weather here in Galicia, however, tonight we had a small window without rain or clouds for twenty minutes or so which just happened to coincide with the time of the wonderful conjunction of the crescent Moon with Venus passing behind it and Jupiter up to the top right.

I went outside to take a look and could see the crescent moon, but no more. I stood watching it for a few moments, before I noticed a tiny point of light at the bottom right of the moon - Venus was beginning to poke its head from behind the sliver of the crescent moon. Sadly I had no tripod with me and so I had to balance the exposure with the ISO very carefully so as not to blur the photos or fill them with noise. I got a few which are no great works of art, but they are satisfying reminders of this rather wonderful astronomical spectacle.

This first image was the first one I took, just as Venus started to show itself. The sky was still quite bright at this point and so Jupiter, to the top right is harder to see in this image, the sky was also filled with a mist, which stopped perfect visibility at this point.

But Jupiter became brighter as the sky grew darker:

and as the sky darkened fully, the clouds drew in and we were left with a slight corona around the moon:

I hope some of you got to see it for real too.

Update:

After processing these photos and giving up hope of seeing any more, I looked out the window to see how much it was raining, only to see this:

Will be looking out for more.

Update, overflow and conjunction

Things are just a little too busy at the moment (hence taking five minutes out to write this!). The atmospheric optics talk is taking a little longer to get right than I'd hoped, having not given a pop-science/photography/flashy images talk for many years. On top of this I'm writing up a conference proceedings, tidying up two papers and working on two other projects simultaneously. I also have to think seriously about a talk I'll be giving before Christmas at a meeting in Madrid. Spanish lessons are on hold this week and I'm not even managing to get to my Spanish exchange. I do however have a temporary housemate who is in between flats with whom I can practice Chinese and Spanish and is currently cooking up a feast while I plug away at mathematica.

And before I forget, at the beginning of December, look out in the early night sky for a fantastic conjunction between Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon

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