Planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury on Sunday, May 26

The planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury were in conjunction Sunday night May 26, the closest they'll appear until 2021.  Here's one of the images I captured before they set.

These planets are close together in the evening sky this week, so every night I've been trying to capture them together on the horizon in the twilight hours before they set. The first night the clouds were too thick. The second night I was shooting sunset in high winds at Mono Lake with the Sierra Nevada as a high western horizon, so I caught a few pictures of the planets, but they set too quickly to capture a time-lapse video. The third night was just right.  It was relatively clear to the west, I was in a high shooting position with an apparent horizon lower than my position (less than 0 degrees elevation), and fortunately that was Sunday May 16, the night when the planets were closest together, forming a tight triangle.

There was still wind to deal with, so I changed position a few times to minimize it. I could only use one camera because I had loaned my daughter one of my tripod head quick release plates the day before, and it was still on her camera back home. There wasn't a lot of light and I was shooting with a 2X teleconverter on my 70-200mm lens at close to 310mm, so my aperture was limited to f/8, forcing me to bump up the ISO to minimize shutter speed in that wind.  (The best I could do was 1/4 second shutter speed, which is why minimizing wind turned out to be critical.)  Fortunately I worked out all the trade-offs in time to capture about four hundred frames, enough to create a time-lapse video.  

I've posted the time-lapse and summarized my four nights of efforts to capture this event on myblog on +Blogger: http://activesole.blogspot.com/2013/05/venus-jupiter-mercury-conjunction-1080p.html

The video is hosted on +YouTube : http://youtu.be/p2NibPZtsQs
It's best switched to 1080p resolution and viewed full screen.

#astronomy     #planetconjunction  

Venus, Mercury and Jupiter in close conjunction May 26, 2013

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