Moon and Five Planets over Downtown Dallas Skyline - This Time With the Pleiades

 

In my last post, I described my efforts to capture an interesting image with the Moon and all five naked-eye planets lined up in the order of their orbits out from the Sun. As the conditions on June 24th were not ideal and elusive Mercury was mostly lost in the haze over Downtown Dallas, I tried again on Sunday, June 26th. The sky was much clearer (at least over the Dallas skyline) and there was less haze. Thankfully, staying up almost all night a second time was definitely worth it!

In the image above, I've added an enlarged insert of each object and labeled them to give everyone a more clear idea of what they are looking at without having to click on the image to see it full screen and then zoom in to tell what each object is. The original, unlabeled image is also included below. 

While the surprise on Friday's outing was the ISS flyby (I'm still working on the timelapse videos from both Friday and Sunday), the surprise in these images is that I also captured the Pleiades star cluster (M45), which you may know as the Seven Sisters (immortalized in the Subaru logo)! 

Another difference between this image and the one from the 24th is that the Moon is "older", now 28 days through its cycle (vs. 26 days on the 24th). Just two days from being a New Moon, in this image it is a thin crescent, only 4% illuminated. However, thanks to the length of the exposure (2 seconds), the camera captured not just the sun-lit crescent but it also captured earthshine, the portion of the Moon not in sunlight but still lit but the sunlight reflected off of the Earth. 

For anyone interested in how this image was created, I started out by taking multiple shots with a Nikon D750 and the kit lens, a Nikkor 24-105mm f/4 lens set to it's widest at 24mm. Each of the 6 images used were taken in portrait orientation and, using a tripod, I started shooting to the left of Mercury, then moved the camera about 35 degrees to the right so that the next shot would be overlapped with the previous, continuing until I had the final shot including Saturn. Each image was taken at ISO 200, f/4 and as noted above, exposed for 2 seconds.  The screenshot to the right was my shooting plan from PhotoPills with the red dot representing my location on the west levee of the Trinity river and the black dot representing the Bank of America Plaza tower (the tallest building in Dallas, the one in the panorama with the bright green lights), about 1.6 miles away. The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, the white suspension bridge arch in the center of the panorama, crosses the Trinity.  The lighter dashed lines with black dots represent the left, center and right of the field of view in the panorama. 

Post-processing involved using software (Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw) to merge the 6 shots into one panorama, then crop and apply adjustments for exposure, sharpness, etc. Next, I edited that image in Photoshop to add the insets and labels. As the merged image exhibited some color banding in the morning twilight sky, I used a technique involving adding a little noise to the image to reduce the banding. Note that I also took some creative license with this shot, editing the inset of the Pleiades to emphasize the major stars so it would be more recognizable.

As always, click an image to view full-screen. Enjoy!

Moon and Five Planets over Downtown Dallas Skyline

 

Step outside this morning about 45 minutes before sunrise and you would have seen an incredible sight, a unique alignment of the visible planets along with a waning crescent Moon.  It's not all that rare to see some combination of planets before sunrise or after sunset but it's pretty rare for them to be aligned in the order that they occur extending out from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Even more so with the Moon in view.

There's nothing special or mysterious about this alignment. It just happens that the relationship between Earth and each of the other planets in their orbits around the Sun is such that they line up this way now. But isn't it beautiful! 

I had originally planned to go find a spot out in the countryside with dark skies to take this shot but just the Moon and planets on their own with nothing interesting in the foreground seemed a bit boring. I did a number of test shots over the past week and determined that even with the bright lights of downtown Dallas, they would still be visible in a shot like this. 

Unfortunately, the haze was just a bit too heavy this morning for Mercury to really show up. It's there but just hard to see without zooming in really close. Given how close the planet orbits the Sun, it is never that far above the horizon while the sky is still dark enough to see it. I have some other shots I still need to go through though so if I have another where it's more visible, I will post it. 

This image was created by taking four shots with a 15mm wide angle lens. Two were taken with the camera level (to avoid vertical distortion of buildings, bridges, etc.), one aimed just left of the Margaret Hunt Hill bridge (the brightly lit suspension bridge) and the other aimed towards the bright street light to the right. The other images were taken in the same directions but aimed high enough to capture Jupiter and Saturn. The four images were merged as a panorama in Adobe Lightroom. 

The panorama above is only part of what I was working on this morning. I also captured nearly 3000 shots over almost 3 hours that I plan to assemble into a timelapse video. The image to the left shows the shooting setup. The camera on the left is my Nikon D750 with a 14mm Rokinon lens; it's taking the timelapse sequence of images. The camera on the right is my son Brian's D750 with our Irix 15mm lens; it's what I used to take the shots for the panorama. 

Stay tuned for the timelapse! Besides the Moon and planets, it features a special guest appearance from the ISS. 

Click on images to view it full-screen. 

A Strawberry Moon Over Downtown Dallas

 

If you happened to be up early the morning of June 14th, 2022, prior to sunrise, you might have caught a glimpse of the full Moon. I say might, because if you  look closely you'll notice a wisp of clouds across the face of the Moon and within a few minutes of when this was taken, the clouds completely obscured any lunar view. 

This shot with the full Moon over Downtown Dallas was taken from Winfrey Point on the east shore of White Rock Lake. I had hoped to capture it lower, just above the city skyline shortly before it set but this was the last shot I got before the clouds moved in. If only the clear view had held for another 15 minutes!

You can still catch a view of this month's full Moon (weather permitting). Just step outside the evening of the 14th after about 9:22pm CDT and watch for it to rise in the east. Even early morning and late evening on the 15th it will still be almost full (about 98% illuminated). 

If you have watched news headlines in print, broadcast or online, you probably saw this Moon referred to as a Strawberry Supermoon. In simple terms, the name Strawberry is a historical name (among others) given to full Moons in the month of June and a Supermoon is just a full Moon when it is closer in its elliptical orbit around Earth than at other times. For more information on this month's Moon, check out this article about it on EarthSky.org. 

Click on the image to see full-screen.