Rare Planetary Alignment PICS

Recently, on the 3rd of December, a rare planetary alignment took place over our night skies. The Moon, Jupiter and Venus aligned themselves to form a striking formation in which the Moon slipped between our skies second and third brightest objects.

At the time I was sitting in my house when a friend gave me frantic call telling me to run outside and look up at the Moon. I'm glad I did. Here are some of the shots I managed to get.

I was hoping we could all contribute to the thread to collate the different views and angles we each were treated to, so feel free to upload and share. The Philippines got to see a beautiful smiley face

This is what I saw from South Africa, enjoy:





What I find most incredible about the above image is that you can actually see the distinctly blue and red/brown images of Venus of Jupiter respectively, you can even tell that they are spherical! And these were taken with nothing but a consumer digicam!

I was really looking forward to seeing this for myself but over here in the UK we had cloud cover that night.

last night though was a lovely clear night and i shot one of my best moon pics.
I am really chuffed with this one. Hope you don't mind me sharing on this thread.



Cheers
Jon

That's a great photograph! I'm sorry you didn't get to see it, you could have retrieved some amazing shots What equipment are you using?

ps. Have you taken pics of the planets at all?

[edit on 7-12-2008 by The_Modulus]

reply to post by The_Modulus

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Amazing images !!! Yes they really brings a
Thanks for share lucy in the sky with a

I am using a Mead ETX125 (5") scope and a canon G6 camera that is just pointing down the eyepiece. (but secured to the scope)
Used a bit of zoom and used the 10 second timer to let the image settle down before the shutter released.

I haven't tried the planets yet but i hope to soon.

jon.

Bad luck mate - I'm down in Plymouth and I got a great view of that when I was walking to he shop, if I remember we had a mostly clear sky... But it could just of been a very big gap in the clouds - I wasn't looking at the clouds.

OP - nice pics! thanks for posting them, I've been watching those two planets change position each night when I'm out walking, I'm almost imagining a subtle grinding noise as the planets move - I know that's a little odd, not least cos one of the planets is a gas giant - but hey it's my little world.

I like your website jon1, I hope to get myself some cosmic eavesdropping device in the near future. You can get CCD telescope setups for a fair bargain these day... now I just need to earn an income


So there's no one else out there who took snaps of this event? It's going to be another 44 years before we see the like again! I can't even find good images around the blagosphere... looks like no one was watching

There is a HUGE thread on this already:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Whaaat? I searched and everything... obviously my interwebs skillz need sharpening

I thought I was the first one to it