Moon Venus Occultation

Occultation is the passage of a celestial body across a line between an observer and an object in the solar system. Otherwise occultation is the eclipse of one celestial object by another one. On 18th of June 2007, I did not go for my regular evening walk due to some unavoidable reasons. I usually go for the walk with my camera in my hand on the expectation of clicking something interesting, beautiful or strange. Luckily I did not miss this event. My class mate and friend, Naseer T P who is staying in Sharjah, called me up and informed that some events are happening in the sky which will be interesting to me. Moon and another planet so close when looked from the earth! I got dressed up immediately and went out with camera and accessories not to miss the event. When I reached out of my building, I saw some, watching this event, some one taking snaps using mobile cameras and all.

Combined 18x optical zoom of Canon PowerShot S2 IS with the teleconverter TC-DC58B and the additional 4x digital zoom gave me the following images. Since I was not equipped with a tripod, it was difficult to take the image shake free and hold the camera steady at the desired angle. Since only the crescent of the moon is visible, the luminosity was less, making the automatic shutter speed adjust to 1/8 of a second, so I shifted to custom mode, first did a focus lock, which helped me to take more pictures in the short time span. I manually decreased the shutter speed, which gave me the image of Moon and Venus in strange colors as you see in the images above and below. I clicked almost 370 images of this, using the continuous shooting mode of the camera, which gave me some good images, which are shared here. Now I believe that its time for me to shift to a D-SLR one.

When I started my IT career in Bangalore, I remember one day I witnessing the same event on an evening with clear sky, while I was coming back home after buying milk. Abins’s mother told me the importance of occultation of Venus by Moon. She was an expert in this subject. That time I did not had a camera with me to capture the wonderful event. Later I learned that the event happens very rarely, now when I did a Google research I found that Venus trajectory made lot of interesting happenings in the last one or two weeks, and is about to make more in the coming days. But occultation of Venus by Moon is the most prominent one and that can be viewed very easily and with naked eye.