Alignment of Saturn, Mercury, and Venus
So it seems that as seen here Saturn, Venus, and Mercury are aligned tonight.
Well, on the way home from my parents house tonight I grabbed a shot of this alignment. The shot is just a quick RAW snapshot that I quickly converted with dcraw, dumped into photoshop, tweaked the color, the exported to a JPEG.
If you’d like to see this image, take a quick look here: http://www.nuxx.net/images/saturn-venus-mercury_alignment_test.jpg
I’ll probably get a better one uploaded later, but you can clearly see the alignment in this shot.
I would have just posted the image itself, but it doesn’t look good too small, and I want to go watch some Frontline right now, not mess with the image. So, just click the link.
UPDATE: Better version behind the cut, or at this link: http://www.nuxx.net/images/saturn-venus-mercury_conjunction_wide.jpg
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wow! great shot.
Thank you. :)
…and that was lacking any sort of bulb release. I used one hand to hold the tripod down HARD, and the other to try and press the shutter button as gently as possible.
I really, really need a bulb release.
I actually snagged a couple more of this scene from a different perspective, but they were taken in a park and I was being distracted by the large crowd of people playing basketball, so I was feeling odd and I didn’t frame things properly.
By the way, do you shoot anything in any sort of raw mode? I think I’ve found (after reading about it time and time again) a proper trick to getting RAW images (of whatever kind) to act as true digital negatives, cutting out the various automatic post-processing done by most RAW plugins and converters.
That is, use dcraw (in one of it’s many forms) and tweak the color by hand.
Oh, I didn’t mention that the power line-ish shot was taken on the side of a random dirt road.
solely in terms of composition i like this image much better than your cropped version. in this one, the different bands of color in the sky give it a nice element. the planets are still bright enough that they are seen and that electrical tower thingie in shadow gives a nice scale element. i also like how you framed the lowest planet between the wires. in your cropped version the wires became too distracting. it might work better if you spend the time to photoshop them out if you just wanted to focus on the planet alignment. in terms of aesthetics though, the orange glow at the horizon is pleasing especially when contrasted against the almost ocean like clouds at the top. it’s nice how the wires almost seperate the colors.
i, too, really want a shutter release cable!
Can I ask which you are talking about? The fulll one, the one of just the power lines, or the one showing just the phases of the planets?
Really, that’s not a finished product at all. I’ve still got the original RAW images here and I really should tweak one color-wise and get it looking nice. Those right there were just quickly run through dcraw, opened in PS, manually had the color adjusted, then exported as JPEG.
Also, if you are looking for a shutter release cable, check out the Harbortronics Digisnap 2000. It looks a lot nicer than the Nikon.
If you have the cable for one of your Nikon cameras, it also seems possible to trigger the camera with this: http://www.charliex.net/cpix/cpix.htm
oh you do have several versions posted about! the one i was talking about that i liked was the one behind the lj cut in your post but now that i see what i think is your original i can better understand your indecision. i didn’t like the very cropped image of just the planets because the wires became very distracting. that image is still nice in a more scientific type of way because it focuses on just the plants but i like the artistic aspects of the other versions better. it depends i guess on what intent you are going for.
i don’t think i am making much sence right now because of a nasty sinus headache, i’ll try to give you a better opinion later.
i think i want to get a macro lens first before the cable. i’m also kinda thinking i want a cable for the speedlight so i don’t have to have it mounted on the camera. as far as that harbortronics product goes, it looks like the D70 has to be modified to use it.
until you get the s.r. cable, you could use the self timer. that way you don’t move the camera when you take the picture.
Oh, heh. The one cropped to just the planets was solely done to show the phases of the planets. It wasn’t meant to look good at all… I’m going to try and do a better job with the color later and spend a bit more time cropping the image before putting it up online.
I want to use the self timer, but I unfortunately cannot. The self timer only works in Macro mode (best I can tell) and Macro doesn’t default to focusing to infinity. If I was doing night-time photography with few minute long exposures I could just to the camera / black card in front of the lens until the shaking is done, but not for now…
Actually, I think with any DSLR when doing this kind of photography one tends to need a card in front of lenses. The mirror slap on a DSLR will shake the camera / tripod enough to blur things slightly. I guess it’s a real problem when using the camera on a telescope. This is why I’m kinda hesitant to get a DSLR.