Night Sky Photography -- 01-19/20-2021 -- Mars & Uranus Conjunction After Sunset

Good evening fellow stargazers!

This evening I have a rather interesting stellar meeting to offer you in the form of my amateur night sky photography: a conjunction between our nearest planetary neighbor, Mars, and one of our more distant ones, Uranus. 

Because of the great distances involved, Uranus cannot be seen by the naked eye from Earth without the aid of a telescope, or the lens of a really good camera at just the right time, if you know where to look.

As you can see in my first photograph, Mars appears much smaller in the night sky these days than it did the previous summer of 2020 during its opposition and close approach to Earth. As it moves away from Earth in its orbit of the sun, Mars will continue to appear as little more than a small orange-yellow dot in the night sky, but still easily visible when the first stars appear in the evening at dusk.
 
In the second image I took a couple of minutes later, I was about to take an extreme close-up using the 35X Optical Zoom lens of my Sony DSC-H300 camera to just barely capture the small blurry dot that is the planet Uranus -- the seventh planet from our sun and the third largest planet in our solar system. 

 

As y'all can see, the two planets appear close together in the night sky in conjunction at about 1.75 degrees apart. To put that into perspective if you were to extend your arm towards the two planets and extend your pinky finger, Mars and Uranus would tough both sides of your extended finger at arms length.

Uranus was first discovered to be a new planet by British astronomer Sir William Herschel who first observed the distant planet on March 13, 1781 with his homemade 6.2 inch reflecting telescope in the garden of his home in Bath, Somerset, Great Britain (now the Herschel Museum of Astronomy), initially mistaking it as a comet.

It was later named in 1783 by the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, who later determined that Herschel's "comet" was indeed a planet. Unlike Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, Uranus does not have a Roman god equivalent for a name. The planet is named for the ancient Greek god of the sky Uranus, the father of Kronos (Saturn) and grandfather of Zeus (Jupiter).

Not visible from Earth, Uranus has a smaller ring system similar to Saturn’s, except that it orbits the planet at a 90 degree angle. Uranus also has at least 27 moons, the five largest of which are: Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel, and Miranda.

Uranus orbits the sun once every 84 years and in 2033 will have only just completed its third lap of the sun since its discovery in 1871! Because the solar system is in constant motion, the distance between Earth and Uranus changes daily. The closest our two planets get is 1.6 billion miles, and at their farthest, they are about 1.98 billion miles apart. Light takes about 2 hours and 45 minutes to travel from Uranus and arrive at Earth.

My final photo I took earlier this evening of the first First Quarter Moon of 2021, which I think turned out remarkably well. 

 

Well folks I hope y'all enjoyed my evening photography offering. I hope to have some more interesting photos and facts about our nightly neighbors soon. Till then have a wonderful evening and y'all keep your eyes to the night skies!