Four Morning Planets

After wrapping up my time shooting the Milky Way outside our room at the Canyon of the Eagles resort on Lake Buchanan (see my last post), I noticed a bright light through the trees and stepped across to the eastern view of the lake to check it out. Realizing it was Venus, I recalled the unique alignment happening this spring, a clear view of four of the five planets able to be seen with the naked eye in the morning skies: Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn. I set up my equipment again and took a number of shots; below is the best of them with the planets aligned as in the Stellarium screen shot above. 

As this will progress into early summer with the planets jockeying for position relative to each other, the stars and occasionally the moon, I'll be looking for additional opportunities to capture this rare alignment including in late June when Mercury joins the other four. 

Click on image to view full screen.

The Milky Way Outside Our Door

One thing that has been on my bucket list for a long time has been staying at a resort that focuses on astronomy and dark sky observing. The closest to us is Canyon of the Eagles resort near Lake Buchanan in the Texas hill country north west of Austin. Now that I have retired, Linda and I decided to take a few days to check it out. I'll share more about the trip later but for now I'll just share this image of the Milky Way taken just in front of our room. 

I literally took this photo in my PJs!

About 4:30 am, I pulled on a coat and stepped out the door of our room with my equipment to try catching the Milky Way at its highest elevation but also at a time when the moon was close to setting since the nearly full moon is so bright it makes it difficult to see dim things like the Milky Way. I started shooting with my rig out on the open area overlooking the lake about 10 yards from the room. I haven't taken a close look at those shots yet but hopefully a few will turn out okay in spite of the moonshine.  

Just as I was about to quit and go back to bed, I decided to try one more set of shots from the steps to our room. This was taken at 6:07 am, just minutes after the moon set so the sky wasn't quite as washed out as earlier shots were. And although it was about 24 minutes past the start of astronomical morning twilight (typically too late for a good capture of the Milky Way) I think it came out pretty good considering the conditions. 

Click on the image to see full-screen. If you look closely, you will see a few white streaks. Those are satellites. The exposure time for this image was 8 seconds so those streaks represent the path of each of those satellites over that period of time. 

Note that editing Milky Way images is a bit of an art and something I don't have a lot of experience with yet so you may see this or other images from this trip posted later on with improved edits.