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 journey continues beyond 2009... check it out!
No comments:
Post a Comment