Monday, March 26, 2012

Jupiter and Venus align over Glasgow

I was walking home at dusk the other day on an unseasonably warm night and a few bright lights in the sky caught my eye. I heard through the grapevine that some planets were getting ready to line up, but I wasn't sure which, though I was pretty sure that's what I was looking at. The night sky was a deep blue color and you could still see the fringes of daylight setting behind a thick front of clouds moving toward the city.

My friend, Sara, who lives in Saskatoon, has been taking a lot of awesome nighttime photos in northern Canada and inspired me to grab my camera as soon as I got home and try to take some good photos of the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus (as I later learned that's what I was looking at).

Around the block from my flat is a little park that I thought would be a perfect place to take some photos. It was, except for the fact that even this late in the evening lots of kids were playing on the playground equipment and I'm sure some of the parents were wondering what this guy (me) was doing with a nice camera at a childrens' playground was doing. A little self-conscious about my photos and not wanting to draw undue attention to myself, I made sure to be focusing my lens up at the sky!

Anyway, here are the few photos that actually turned out somewhat nice. I definitely need to invest in a tripod, though, as the rest of the photos I took were pretty much just a bunch of squiggles in the sky. I'm hoping that we'll get another solar storm in the near future, in which case, I will try and get to northern Scotland and maybe glimpse some aurora borealis!


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This work by Eric W. Portenga is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.