Good evening fellow stargazers!
Well my friends, this month has started out being pretty good for planet watching.
On the first day of May, I got up early to capture some really good shots of the conjunction between Venus and Jupiter about 45 minutes before sunrise.
As you can see in my first photo, the two bright planets are very close to each other, roughly 0.3 degrees (or the width of the moon) apart in the morning sky. They were actually closer the day before with Jupiter to the upper left of Venus at 0.2 degrees apart, but unfortunately cloud cover prevented me from capturing a shot that morning.
Even though Venus and Jupiter appear next to each other in the sky, they are really nowhere near each other in space being separated by 430 million miles (690 million km), or nearly five times the distance between Earth and the Sun!
The two planets will continue to move away from each other with Venus moving slowly towards the sunrise and Jupiter higher in the sky towards another conjunction with Mars on May 29th of this year.
The next set of photos I took the evening of the next day showing the tiny planet Mercury in the western sky along with our lovely moon in her very thin crescent form.
The winter constellations are sinking towards the western sky as summer looms closer, as seen by the position of the bright star Aldebaran in the Constellation Taurus The Bull in the photo closer to the horizon.
Mercury itself is moving closer to disappearing behind the western horizon with them but will be making its appearance in the eastern sky in the mornings with its fellow Wanderers next month in June. This is because Mercury's orbit around the Sun -- about 88 days -- will move the small planet around to the far side of the Sun for a least the next month, or so.
Throughout the morning of June, all five of the visible planets to Earth in the sky dome will be visible in a line following the ecliptic in the early morning hours before sunrise in order from closest to the farthest! (It should also be noted that the distant planets of Uranus and Neptune can also be seen in this lineup with a telescope, or really good camera lens if you know where exactly to look).
I will do my best to try and capture an image of that event when the time comes, until then I hope y'all have enjoyed my planetary photography. Until next time, be sure to keep your eyes to the skies, y'all hear!
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