| More images
Details:
In late June the 5 classical planets will line up along the ecliptic in their order out from the Sun. The outer 3 planets (I'm including Pluto) will also line up similarly although the 2 sequences will be intermixed. To top it off, the waning Moon will visit each planet in turn on successive nights (starting with Pluto on Jun 16th and ending with Mercury on Jun 27th), and on June 24th it can even sub for Earth in the lineup.
This morning (Saturday) Jupiter sidled up next to Venus, ready to swap places. Both brilliant white at negative magnitudes, they commanded one's attention much more compellingly than the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of Dec 2020. The view in binoculars was strikingly beautiful. Mars and Saturn were so much dimmer they were barely noticed among the stars even before dawn began to brighten the sky. Neptune (at mag 7.9) was, of course, invisible to the eye, but it did show up vaguely in the stacked image, though possibly not in the downsized version of it uploaded here. Labeled and unlabeled versions.
Back in late January 2016 the 5 planets were also lined up before dawn, except Saturn was out of order.
You can revisit them here.
Photo data:
-- Panasonic GX8, Lumix 20mm lens, photo tripod
-- 30 x (f/2, 10 sec, ISO 400) = 5 minutes
-- stacked in DSS, processed in PSP X2
-- taken at start of nautical twilight MDT, Apr 30, 2022
Photographer's website:
No URL provided.
|
