Spica – The Amazing Sky

November 14, 2015November 14, 2015

The Visible Ecliptic at Dawn

The morning planets are now strung out along the ecliptic, visualizing this line in the sky.

This was the view this morning, November 14, of the three dawn planets lined up along the ecliptic, with the stars Spica and Regulus also defining this imaginary line.

The ecliptic is the Earth’s orbital path around the Sun projected into the sky. So it is along this line that we see the Sun appear to move around the sky over a year. But it is also the path along which we find the seven other major planets – in this case, three of them: Venus, Mars and Jupiter.

These three worlds were clustered together in October, but are now spreading out along the ecliptic, as Venus drops lower but Mars and Jupiter climb higher.

The stars Spica and Regulus also lie along the ecliptic, where the Moon can occasionally pass in front of, or occult, these stars.

So the two stars and three planets are now nicely drawing the ecliptic line for us in the dawn sky. At this time of year, the ecliptic is also steeply angled above the eastern horizon.

The main image above is a stack of 4 x 20 second exposures for the ground, to smooth noise, and one 20-second exposure for the sky, all with the Nikon D810a at ISO 1000 and Nikkor 14-24mm lens at f/2.8 and at 14mm.

Venus (brightest), with dim Mars above it, then bright Jupiter, in a diagonal line across the dawn sky on November 14, 2015, with the Zodiacal Light barely visible in the brightening twilight sky. Arcturus is a left and Spica is just rising at centre. Corvus is just above the treetops at right. Spica, Venus, Mars and Jupiter more or less define the line of the ecliptic in the autumn morning sky here. This is a stack of 4 x 20 second exposures for the ground, to smooth noise, and one 20-second exposure for the sky, all with the Nikon D810a at ISO 1000 and Nikkor 14-24mm lens at f/2.8 and at 24mm

This image just above is with the same gear but with the lens at the 24mm setting to more tightly frame the planets.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the sky at dawn, Orion and his winter sky friends were setting into the west (image below).

Orion and the winter constellations setting over the old Farmhouse at home, in the dawn twilight on the morning of November 14, 2015. Canis Major and Sirius are at left; Taurus and Aldebaran and the Pleiades are at right. Procyon is at upper left. This is a stack of 4 x 20 second exposoures for the ground to smooth noise and one 20-second exposure for the sky, all with the Nikon D810a at ISO 1600 and 14-24mm Nikkor zoom lens at f/2.8.

All the images here are shot with the Nikon D810a camera and the amazing Nikkor 14-24mm lens, two items in hand this month for testing and review. A thorough test will appear in future blogs.

Of course, as wonderful as the gear is, it cannot extract the ecliptic line and labels from the sky – those are added in Photoshop!

July 12, 2014

Super Moonrise at Red Rock Coulee

The Full Moon rises over the sandstone formations of Red Rock Coulee, Alberta.

This was moonrise – a super Moonrise – on Friday, July 11, 2014.

Publicized as yet another “super moon,” this moonrise was certainly excellent for me, with superb skies at Red Rock Coulee in southern Alberta. There’s no way anyone would be able to detect the fact this Moon was a little closer and larger than most Full Moons of 2014. But it was still a fine sight.

Here, you see it sitting in the pink Belt of Venus fringing the dark blue band of Earth’s shadow rising in the east just after sunset. The already red rocks are lit by the warm light of the western twilight.

The main photo is an HDR stack of 6 exposures, to capture the range in brightness from bright sky to darker foreground.

This night, as it is for a week or so at mid-month, reddish Mars was sitting just above blue-white Spica in Virgo. They are visible here as a double star in the moonlit southwestern sky. Saturn is to the left. This is a single exposure.

It was another perfect night – warm, dry and bug free, for 3 hours of moonlight time-lapse shooting, as well as taking these still images.

April 15, 2014April 15, 2014

Lunar Eclipse from Oz

The eclipsed red Moon rises over the waters of Lake Macquarie on the east coast of Australia.

I was still in Australia for this eclipse and managed to see and shoot it, but only just!

I was on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where clouds and rain have been prevalent all week, in part caused by departing remnants of Cyclone Ita. The prospects for seeing this eclipse from the coast looked bleak indeed.

From eastern Australia, the Moon rose at sunset in mid-eclipse on our evening of April 15. I was with family in Australia and so we made an evening picnic of the event, joining a few others in the lakeside park who were there to also see the eclipsed Moon over Lake Macquarie, Australia’s largest salt water lake. I wanted to catch this eclipse over water, to see the effect above — the “glitter path” from the Moon but one turned red by the eclipsed Moon.

As we were about to give up, I caught sight of the Moon as it rose into breaks in the cloud, revealing the red Moon near Spica and Mars. We saw the last of totality and the early stages of the final partial eclipse. But later in the evening clouds rolled in again and the rain poured down. Indeed, I took my last images of the eclipse with light rain falling and the cameras getting wet. This isn’t the first eclipse I’ve watched in the rain!

I shot with fixed cameras with 50mm and 135mm lenses. The top image is a 135mm telephoto shot, the other three are with the 50mm lens.

April 6, 2014

Mars and Spica from Oz

Mars and Spica form a contrasting pair of stars in the east, as Mars reaches its closest point to Earth.

This was the scene two nights ago, April 5, as Mars and Spica rose together in the east. Mars is now near opposition, its closest point to Earth making Mars extra bright. Its reddish tint contrasts nicely with blue-white Spica, the brightest star in Virgo.

If the arrangement of Mars and Spica looks unusual, it’s because I took this from Australia. So the relative position of Mars and Spica looks “upside down” compared to a northern hemisphere view. Moonlight from the waxing Moon light the gum trees.

August 21, 2012August 21, 2012

A Convergence of Worlds in the Sky

The evening planet show we’ve been enjoying all year comes to a close for a while, but in grand style with a convergence of four worlds in the dusk.

This was the scene from my front driveway, Tuesday, August 21, as the waxing crescent Moon shone near Mars (just above the Moon) and Saturn (at top right just above the clouds), and near the star Spica (to the right of the Moon). The four objects formed a somewhat lopsided square in the evening twilight. But from my latitude of 51° North, they were very low and never visible in a dark sky. Enjoying them with the eyes required binoculars to pick them out.

Saturn will disappear behind the Sun shortly, but Mars hangs around in the evening sky for a few more months, but always low and easy to miss.