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2004.12.31 I saw on SpaceWeather that all of the visible planets were up and visible at the same time early in the mornings this week, so I got up at 5:00am and headed out to the end of the runway at the Los Alamos Airport and set up my camera on a tripod to take some wide-field pictures of Mercury, Venus, and Mars. I also printed out a complete list of the morning's celestial events from CalSky. I had to aquaint myself with what the difference between "Dawn, Astronomical Twighlight, Civilian Twilight, and Sunrise" were. The events of interest other than all of the planets being visible at once included a brief 25 second ISS pass and an Iridium flare. The ISS pass was supposed to be much brighter than the flare and in the dark part of the sky, so I watched for it. Unfortunately, I didn't have a clock with second hands and the accuracy of the clock on my pager was no guaranteed to be more than +/- 10 minutes or so. I looked in the right direction for a few minutes and didn't see anything. I turned around to set up the camera for taking pictures of the planets and just happened to look in the right direction for the flare and saw the entire thing. It was really bright! I wish I had had a precision watch so that I could have taken a time-exposure of it. Anyway, I got the camera set up and took some good shots of the planets. I took a variety of exposure settings as the sky brightened and managed to capture Mercury, Venus, Mars, Sabik, and Antares in frame nicely with a 20mm lens (32mm equivalent). The longer exposures were too trailed, but the shorter ones came out really well. Here is the best shot and here is an annotated version of it. |