I was hoping to get a picture of Venus, Mars and the Moon making a triangle in the Eastern sky this morning, but clouds hid the Moon. So i settled for a couple panorama running from Venus and Mars in the East to the Southern Cross in the South. I labeled on of the panos showing where Venus, Mars and the Southern Cross are located.
It seems like only a week ago that I was observing Venus diving down towards the Western horizon each evening. (it was more like 2 weeks) You could have knocked me over with a feather yesterday morning when I headed East at 06:30 on my early morning bike ride and saw Venus blazing away in the Eastern sky. I snapped a couple pictures this morning.
There was a very skinny Moon next to Mercury last night. (we didn't see it) Tonight the still skinny Moon will be to the left of Saturn, and on Wednesday, the getting fatter, crescent Moon will be to the left of Jupiter.
If it is clear enough tonight, I'm going to try to get a shot with both the comet and the moon in it. I'm not sure if it will work but it sounds like a good challenge.
Here is a full frame version of the comet picture I posted earlier today. You can see more tail than you can see on the previous full frame picture. I maxed out the comet contrast, so the next time I work on the image, I'll try to keep a little color in the towers and smooth out the sky.
While watching the end of the Rose Bowl game, I did a quick process job on one frame from my comet photo session at the TWR transmitter site tonight. I'll go through all the images later and see if I can come up with something print-worthy. I like this one because it provides a sense of scale. I'll put up a cropped image of just the comet, later, if it happens to show more detail than the one i posted a few days ago.
Happy New Year! I was out at the transmitter site this evening to restart a computer and check out the comet. There were still quite a few nice fireworks up in the sky too. Venus is rapidly heading back to the horizon. I snapped a shot of Venus in between the clouds. It is blurry, but shows how Venus goes through phases much like the moon.
