Red Moon and Venus

Take a peek out toward your western skies tonight or tomorrow night to see Venus and the Moon together for their monthly meeting.

Some folks don’t realize that bright dot half-way up in the sky over where the Sun set is a planet! The Moon will move on after the next couple of nights, but Venus will be hanging out there for another month or two. Venus is the brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and Moon, so that makes it easier to spot and hard to believe it’s a celestial object.

In a telescope, it’s a white blob in a dark sky. But if you can find Venus early in twilight, strong binoculars or, even better, any telescope, will show Venus is half lit. I’ll come back to that at the end of the blog post.

Here are photos I took with the Canon XS last night (Monday, May 22nd) looking out over the Hudson River from the park next to the Dobbs Ferry train station.

15 second exposure at ISO 200 and f7.1 with the zoom lens at 18mm focal length. Used low ISO to try to catch the red coloring on the Moon.

Same camera, different lens. Cropped from larger photos. Zoom lens set to 250mm at f/7.1 for 1/5 second at ISO 200. Shows details on the Moon.

Different exposure – from a 135mm zoom lens setting, cropped from larger photo to show Earthshine on the Moon, which over-exposes the Sunlit portion. But, you can see the roughness at the edge of the Sunlit part. 15 second exposure at f/7.1 and ISO 200.

Lens zoomed to 135mm for a 15 second exposure at ISO 200. Venus has moved a bit during the exposure, some Earthshine visible on the Moon.

These photos show what you can see if you look out after Sunset. The Moon will be higher each night. Binoculars are not needed, but can make it easier to see the Earthshine on the Moon.

Venus is small in a telescope, but will get larger and thinner over the next month:

I grabbed this view through the 8-inch dobsonian telescope at 200X with my iPhone to show what you can see with a telescope pointed at Venus.

Cropped from the larger iPhone photo above.