Large Magellanic Cloud

I haven't seen the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy, since 2010.  But I've been hankering to try to get a better picture of it, with some foreground objects in there for scale.

 

The night sky looked pretty clear tonight, so I zoomed out to Red Slave to see if I could get a shot. The LMC is only about 6 or 7 degrees above the horizon at its highest, so the sky has to be very clear to be able to see it.

 

There was some light haze, but I was lucky enough to get a couple shots when the LMC was located in a hole in the haze. This is a three minute exposure with a 85mm lens working at f2 and ISO 800.

 

 

Three Moons over Bonaire

I went outside with the dog around 10 pm for his final pee and saw the Moon real near Jupiter. It was quite striking.

 

You can use the Moon to identify all the major planets over the next week or so.

 

The moon will be near Mars on Feb. 1. It will be near Saturn on Feb. 3 and it will make an equilateral triangle with Venus and Mercury on Feb.5.

 

 

 

I shot a picture of the moon and Jupiter and when I zoomed into the shot, lo and behold I could see two of Jupiter's moons! So the close-up picture below shows three moons in total. whoo - whoo 

You'll need to click on these images to see the larger versions I think.

 

I am regularly amazed at what a camera can capture with a normal lens, 85mm in this case.

Full Moon Rising

The Moon was only three hours from being completely full when it came up this evening at 6:20 pm. The Sun set at 6:30, so they were sitting on opposite horizons at the same time.

It was quite windy and there were still eight kite sailors out on the water at sunset.

Here is what the moon looked like a little later on as I continued around the south end of Bonaire.

Wednesday Sunset

We've been watching the moon grow in size since Monday evening.  It is still a nice crescent shape, but is much higher in the sky already.

The sunset was nice this evening, not super bright, but there was color of some sort around the entire 360 degrees of the horizon.

You can see the moon in the full size version of the picture.