Good evening fellow stargazers!
This evening the skies were beautifully clear after several cloudy evenings due to the usual hit-and-run summer storms that happen in this part of South Carolina this time of year, as well as the lingering smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Tonight I was able to capture a couple of beautiful shots of our two closest planetary neighbors: Venus and Mars together in the evening sky an hour after sunset.
As you can see from my photos, Mars is in close conjunction with the bright star, Regulus, in the Constellation Leo The Lion, appearing about a full moon's length apart from our vantage point here on the surface of the Earth. In actuality, Regulus is a quadruple star system, the largest of which (Regulus A) lies approximately 79 light-years (or about 24.2 parsecs) from our Sun.
Both Venus and Mars are moving slightly farther apart in the night sky after appearing closely together on Saturday, July 1st -- which I was unfortunately unable to get due to cloud cover. The two inferior planets (inner planets of our Solar System) will continue to remain close for most of this month, though they are drifting apart in their orbits around the Sun in relation of our own Earth.
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