The Evening Star Returns

[WCGucfa]

Now that I think of it Mike, I suppose the bow in their flight pattern has every right to bend in that
direction, making it look like they're going north. Could you speed up the shutter speed a little the next
time so the birds don't suffer from motion blur? I need sharp images to make accurate direction estimates.
This is so embarrassing!
Forget the longer exposures to capture sharp planets images!

Bill G.

[NGC7000]

...to wonder just why the hell they are going in that direction!

My guess is a nightime bombing mission.

[Ronald Z]

Hey Mike,

nice succession of images of the M & V meeting....great work!

Ron Z

[Apollo XX]

T'was cold and windy this evening, yessiree, but this time I held on tight to the tripod and didn't let the camera go flying! Venus and Mercury are done with each other for the time being, and now they're going their separate ways. Venus will continue to climb deeper into the evening twilight until she bejewels the night sky with her brilliance, while Mercury heads off toward the sun. Mercury has dimmed significantly in the past week, but is still easy to find because it has continued to climb. That's over. Now Mercury will drop a little each day while still continuing to dim as it reflects less sun in its crescent phases. Luckily Venus will still be nearby to help locate Mercury, so if you get a chance over the next week or so, throw a scope on the little planet. Please pardon my repeating myself, but it's been said that most people have never knowingly seen Mercury , and of the few people that have, most of them have never seen a crescent phase Mercury. Any clear evening in the next week will be a good opportunity to do just that.

Venus and Mercury at 5:40pm EST on January 16, 2015:


Over the course of this thread I've tried to keep most of the images framed the same with regards to the FOV over the horizon. As you can see, if this goes on much longer that won't be possible. The planets are moving north very quickly.

[Apollo XX]

As our saga continues, Mercury has taken a decidedly different direction than his sometime-companion Venus. How different? In this latest graphic example of their divergent paths, we see the pair back on the 16th at 5:23pm EST, and again on the 19th at 5:26pm. That puts the sun at basically the same angle below the horizon in both shots. As Venus continues to rise (and she will continue to for quite some time to come) Mercury has clearly steered northward and has begun to fall from our perspective in his path around the sun. Mercury is also dimming rapidly and will become harder to pull out of the evening twilight in the coming days. If the sky holds for tomorrow evening, I may try to turn a scope on Mercury, when the little planet will be at 29% - definitely waning crescent. The best I've done to date is 27%, but this apparition may present some opportunities to surpass that. Viewing Mercury in a crescent phase is fun - not quite as fun as Venus - but fun just the same.

The gap is growing. Venus and Mercury on the 16th:


And again on the 19th:

[Apollo XX]

So our early evening viewing time is coming to a close with our good friend Mercury, as he now speeds around the sun and on toward inferior conjunction. The sky cleared this afternoon and I headed over to my low-horizon haunt with a scope to try and get a good look at the tiny planet in a crescent phase. Even though Mercury is getting closer to us by the minute, its magnitude is dimming by a stunning .2 mag per day, and today it was at .42 mag. When you couple this dimming with the fact that it's also dropping deeper into the brighter sunset sky, this means that it is getting more difficult to find in a timely manner for viewing.

The first thing to pop of course was Venus, and at least that could be used as a marker of sorts. I finally found the little guy at about 5:05pm with it about 10* over the western horizon. After viewing it for a few minutes, I stuck the camera on the scope. Forgetting how dim the image actually is for the camera through a 3x barlow, I struggled at first with thinking that something was wrong with the camera and that it wasn't recording shots. In reality I had set exposures too short and was just getting black.

By the time I sorted it out, Mercury had dropped to about 7* above the horizon and the seeing there was of course abysmal. The best of my snaps were definitely bloated, but I still caught the basic shape. The through-the-eyepiece view was somewhat better though, and I again found it worth the effort to have a go at it.

Mercury at 29% phase, .42 Mag, 8.3" apparent diameter, 5:20pm EST:

[AndyG]

Amazing!

[Apollo XX]

Thanks Andy! The next (and probably last) opportunity for this apparition looks like maybe Thursday, but honestly I'm doubting the ability to actually find it at .8+ Mag in a bright sunset. If it can in fact be located, the view at 20% phase would be very interesting!

[Apollo XX]

In what may turn out to be the last series of entries for this adventure with our inner planets, the weather took an unpredicted turn this afternoon and gave me a break that I honestly didn't expect. With mostly cloudy skies for much of the day I really didn't think that they'd be a photo-op, but I took the ride down anyway because you just never know.

At 4:55pm, the sky towards the west wasn't too bad at all - definitely workable!


By 5:00pm, we were pulling Venus and a very faint 3% waxing crescent moon - naked eye even!


It was fifteen more minutes before Mercury joined the scene, but at 5:15pm there he was:


By 5:25pm, the encroaching clouds were just about to swallow up Mercury:


And by just past 5:30pm, all that was left was a few minutes of Venus and an earthshine moon:


For the eagle-eyed viewers that may have noticed and are wondering, the star to the left of Venus is Mag 2.85 Deneb Algedi in the constellation Capricornus.

[AndyG]

Very nice, Mike. I saw this when I was driving home from work and thinking it sure would be great if Mike could get a shot of it... and you did!