To the left is the moon, on the right is Venus with the same luminosity if you weren’t seeing it through my phone camera. It’s probably the brightest I’ve seen in a year. Taken in Colorado so I don’t know how your local orientation will differ.
I get some weird artifacting on my phone so Venus is partly blotted where it was the brightest.
Oh shit space is doing an Islam
Your phone sensor is actually hella good. If you look at Venus through a telescope, you’ll see that we’re actually seeing her perpendicular to the sun-- a quarter of it in shadow and a quarter of it in light. I think that could be why it looks so odd here.
I think it’s so bright it overloaded the sensor, that fuckin rules
Wait no Venus come back.
Yours is a lot closer to the naked eye image. I couldn’t get one without zooming in to avoid surface lights.
I usually use manual controls as well. Just have a quick shutter speed and it’ll capture less light so that it captures an image that is closer to what you see with the naked eye.
I noticed this the other day too.
Hello morning star!
The star is a communist symbol, maybe this is a good omen for us. I kid of course, but it’s nice to pretend it means something good. It’s pretty if nothing else.
I wish I had a good telescope, I’ve always wanted to see Jupiter through a telescope.
I splurged on a Celestron 130 because I’m surrounded by good dark sky areas, but now I have a super fragile and bulky thing that’s hard to orient without phone service. When I finally get it working though, I’ll immediately fail at astronomy because I’m bad at maths.
Hello, comrade, perhaps I can help? I take it it’s using the cellphone as a push-to system? If I’m not mistaken, that mount can be detached and replaced with a dovetail mount that will take a RACI or a Telrad instead. I fucking LOVE RACIs, cannot recommend them enough.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll definitely look into a RACI. Upgrading it for proper astrophotography with my DSLR would be great. My issue is with the star finder. That model has a super cool feature where it will automatically reposition to view different objects in its database. But in order to do that it needs to have exact coordinates. The few times I’ve taken it out, I haven’t had phone reception to know exactly where I am because I’m just opportunistically doing it while camping. Approximating them just confuses it and it refuses to lock onto things.
Oh, man, astrophotography is an eventual goal of mine, but yikes is it expensive. It’s my understanding that these systems usually have some mode where they can be dialed in by two bright stars that you know what they are or Polaris or something like that, no need for coordinates, it just works the math out on its own. Is that not the case for the star sense system? Also, is there any way to drive it with a third party app like Stellarium?
I tried that mode but the system was being obnoxious about focusing on them. I’ll have to try it with Stellarium since I already use that for naked-eye viewing.
Now might be a really great time to try again, there’s some really great bright stars in the southern sky right now, what with Orion (Rigel would be optimal but probably any of the belt stars would work) and Canis Major (Sirius, what else?) on the rise.
You’ve also got Gemini approaching the zenith. Castor and Pollux would probably be ideal for this; remember, Castor casts their leg out.
Fuck I love astronomy
I’m a naturalist and natural scientist because it’s the most real thing. Astronomy is the most real thing of the real things.
Indeed, we need look no further than the skies and our surroundings for all the beauty we could ever hope to desire, and their study intensifies this further still.
praying its like that movie meloncholia and venus just gets bigger and bigger until a week from now when were all raptured
Melancholia is so fucking good. Everyone should watch Melancholia if nothing for but how they use Tristan und Isolde.
It’s full cloudy tonight ;_;
so pretty
I do stargazing classes with the city parks and I fucking love Venus. I say hi to her every evening. She’s got to be going into retrograde soon, I think.
