Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Star Shot

It was fairly warm last Monday night and the sky was mostly clear so I went out to take some pictures of the moon and stars. I didn't get anything real spectacular, or so I thought.

Tuesday I was looking through the Flickr Most Interesting Photos feed and found that there were quite a few other people that did the same thing. What a coincidence, I thought. With a little more research I discovered that I was photographing a very unique occurrence. Turns out that the two stars that were near the moon aren't stars at all, but Venus and Jupiter. And to have all three that close together and the moon not so bright that it overpowers the others is quite rare. Here's some more information if you're interested.

I'm not real happy with the quality of the photo, but a lot of the Flickr photos weren't a lot better, so I don't feel so bad.


I tried a long exposure shot of the stars as well that turned out all right. The shutter was left open for 7 minutes. The stars leave streaks as the earth rotates. I'll have to try this again sometime away from the city.

2 comments:

  1. These are really cool. I saw the same formation and didn't know about it either. If you google..you can set up your Igoogle and one of the gadgets tells you what the stars and moon are doing in your area. I set it up after I found out about this latest formation and don't want to miss it again. Nice job

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  2. I noticed that too and didn't know it was Venus and Jupiter.

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