Moon - Venus - Saturn - Earth in one frame

Moon and Venus 9th November 2023

Moon, Venus and Mercury in one frame

Venus (marked at the top part of the frame), Moon & Mercury (marked at the bottom of the frame)

Venus Transit View From Bangalore - 2012 June 06

Update on 2012-June-06 08:15 IST

Now I got clear pictures of the Venus transit (2012 June 06) from the terrace of the building where I live. This time I used my tripod effectively. In these new pictures, along with the Venus on the top left corner, you can see many sunspot groups spread over the solar disk. All these photographs are using my old Canon PowerShot S2 IS with a tele-convertor TC-DC58B. I used couple of x-ray films to adjust the brightness. Many times it was too difficult to adjust the brightness and point at the sun at the same time to get it in focus as the clouds made sudden and a lot of brightness change. Here are the pictures with the time of capture as title.

07:28 IST

07:29 IST

07:32 IST

07:32 IST

07:32 IST

07:32 IST

07:35 IST

07:43 IST

I got these first pictures of Venus Transit of 2012 June 6th from Bangalore around 06:35 am IST. I waited from 05:45am and at last, the sun peaked through the monsoon clouds for a small moment, and I could capture only these shaky pictures, the wind was very high at the apartment roof, and I could not hold the camera and the x-ray film firmly to get a better focus, by the time I reach again with my Tripod, the clouds again obscured the sun. These pictures are taken around 06:35 am IST.

The Belt of Venus

The belt of Venus (named after the Roman goddess Venus) is a pink to brownish border separating the dark shadow band of the earth from the sky above it. It is best visible when the atmosphere is cloudless, yet very dusty, just after sunset. The twilight wedge is then rising over the eastern sky and the backscattered red sunlight at the border of the wedge can then be identified as the belt of Venus.

The second image is a panorama created by stitching three images together, vertically. To know more about belt of Venus, click here => APOD: 2001 December 9 - The Belt of Venus

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.