The Apr 30, 2022, Jupiter/Venus Conjunction

 

Jupiter/Venus Conjunction Photo

 

I've taken quite a few artistic liberties with this photo. It was taken at 11:24 UT.

Due to wildfires raging to the south in New Mexico, near Santa Fe, and also north of Flagstaff for the last 10 days or two weeks, our air has been hazy with the smoke. Thus the transparency was not great, though better than I had expected when I got up at 3 AM to get ready to give this conjunction a try. (For the early AM hours there was a pretty good breeze which, I guess, had blown some of the smoke out, rather than in.) The low angular altitude of the event also didn't help, since it meant I was looking through about double the mass of air.

I could not see Jupiter's moons in the camera viewfinder, making focusing a matter of best-guessing. I was somewhat surprised that I was able to pull three of them out during the image processing. According to commenter Rod at Sky & Telescope .com, the three moons are Ganymede, Io, and Callisto. You can even imagine some belt/zone structure on Jupiter itself. Venus, of course, is way over-exposed, but it's gibbous appearance was obvious in shorter exposures.

 

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©2022, Chris Wetherill. All rights reserved. Display here does NOT constitute or imply permission to copy, republish, or redistribute my work in any manner for any purpose without prior written permission.

 

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