Sunrise on 8th February 2017 - A view from Thornberry Estate in Letterkenny

The sunrise (One of the most photographed celestial event along with Sunset) on 8th February 2017 was spectacular, the red and yellow sky gave a warm welcome even though the temperature was around zero with frost all over the ground.

Moon, Venus and Mars Conjunction over Cathedral of St. Eunan and St. Columba - Letterkenny

The three celestial objects - Moon, Venus and Mars showcased a spectacular shown on the evening sky of 31st January 2017. Venus was high enough from the horizon to be clearly spotted by anyone looking towards the West for the past couple of months, similar alignment occurred during the past two similar phase of moon in the last two months. I was delighted to capture the previous alignment which happened around the start of this year and the photos were posted here => http://deepugeorge.blogspot.ie/2017/01/moon-venus-conjunction-2017-jan-2ndmoo.html

The last alignment during the first week of this year made almost the Syzygy arrangement (a word used to denote the  straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system), with Venus and Mars on either side of the crescent moon.

This time, the alignment pictured a smiley face in the sky, Venus positioned towards 2-O-Clock direction and Mars positioned to near 12-O-Clock direction relative to the crescent moon.

Northern lights view from Horn Head on the night of 2017 January 31

January 31st turned out to be a double bonus day for astrophotography enthusiasts, by evening the Moon-Venus-Mars conjunction decorated the evening sky. After a few clicks of the beautiful alignment of the three celestial bodies in the Western part of the sky, I headed towards Horn Head Peninsula - a very good location to watch for Aurora Borealis in Ireland. The night turned out to be fruitful with mostly clear skies and without high wind, more importantly, the atmosphere humidity and temperature of around 2 to 3 degree Celsius did not do dew up the lens. I missed a very good spell of the dancing lights by the time I reached the location (around 9:15 pm Irish time), I met another guy on top of the cliff, who had already photographed a few beautiful snaps by then. In the next two to three hours I kept on clicking until the Aurora almost disappeared from the sky, and I was lucky to create an 18 second’s time lapse video that covered around 2 hours of Aurora. For the first time in my life, the Aurora was bright enough to be clearly seen by the naked eyes. When I reached back home at 03:00 am on Feb 1st, I was so eager to transfer the images to the pc and view them. The images turned up to be satisfactory, so I managed to do the final processing and time lapse video creation as well as publishing the contents to this blog and face book before I went to (I am going to :) ) sleep. 

Time-Lapse Video