Venus dancin' with the Moon

 D Woodall, 5/19/2007 10:01 PM, DSLR A100, F5.6, 180mm, ISO 400, 13 seconds, JPG.

I quite enjoy star gazing, meteor showers, amateur astronomy and such. Last month, I noticed on "Your Sky" that the moon would be quite close to Venus when it came out of new phase, so I tried to take pictures two successive nights with disappointing results. Saturday evening, I walked out in the back yard to talk to my husband and lo and behold there they were, dancing in the sky. I drug out my camera and the book that supports the weird stuff I like to do and began playing with focal length, exposure time and F stop. I got various results. The first two were while it was still a little light. The last was when they were both close to setting. I hope you'll enjoy them. I'm putting a little info with them for those of you who are interested.

Click on the small picture to get a large picture.

D.Woodall, 5/19/2007 8:49PM, DSLR A100, F5.6, 210mm, ISO 400, 1/2 sec, JPG.

D Woodall, 5/19/2007 8:52PM, DSLR A100, F 5.6, 135mm, ISO 4oo, 1/1.3 sec, JPG.

D Woodall, 5/19/2007 9:01 PM ,DSLR A100, F 8, 210mm, ISO 100, 1/10 sec, JPG.

DWoodall, 5/19/2007 10:00PM, DSLR A100, F 8, 180mm, ISO 100, 1/4 sec, JPG.

The picture at the top was the last shot I took. It was taken with the camera on automatic and it was way too long an exposure time. I did darken it slightly from the original, just to take some of the burn off the moon and get a little darker sky. There is some elongation in both the moon and Venus due to the length of exposure.