New Updates

Well everyone, a lot has happened in the past week, including, but not limited to:
Me forgetting to post pictures of last weeks Astronomy Pictures,
Mom's best friend's father passing away,
Dad leaving to spend a full week in Canada to study for the CFA Level III exam,
Aubry trying out for the Talent Show (and getting in, hurray!),
and Mom finally figuring out her all time hobby, Codebreaker, in one try (Yes, we have proof)

First things first, pictures of Astronomy from last weekend (sorry there isn't anything from tonight, I just don't have the stamina to get out the telescope and adjust it, etc. without someone else to help, and since neither Mom nor Jonathan are interested in the extraterrestrial, I'm not going outside) These aren't anything special, just pictures of the moon. In brief, we couldn't take pics of anything else because we (Dad and I) had just gotten back from showing one of our home teaching family s the sky through a basic telescope (which was very exciting).



You can see some craters, faintly, but not all that clearly because we are stil trying to figure out a way to hold the camera steadily throughout the exposure.

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Thomas

Moon occultation of Venus April 22, 2009

Ok, I know Thomas said we wouldn't post anything until Sunday....but earlier this morning was a rare occurrence called an occultation.  The planet Venus was occulted (covered) by the Moon.  It was only visible from North America and we had a perfect shot of it from here in Prescott.  The sky was clear and the temperature was about 60 degrees - an ideal setting to wake up to.   From our house we had to drive over the hill so we could see the sight since it was so low in the sky.  When I crested the hill it was an incredible sight to see Venus so close to the crescent moon.  I got out my camera and started taking pictures.  I am still getting used to the camera and didn't realize until Venus had almost disappeared that I could digitally zoom even more.  It still turned out great.  Simple things like this give me great delight.

Sunday Night Astronomy

Thanks to a wonderful telescope we were gifted for Christmas of last year, we can now see the heavens in a new way. The post of Venus was only the beginning of what I hope will be called "Sunday Night Astronomy". When the opportunity presents itself, every Sunday night, we will attempt to observe and take pictures of other celestial bodies. We took some pictures of Mercury tonight, and I wanted to share some of them with you all (its harder to get a clean picture of Mercury than of Venus, because Mercury is so much smaller, even though it is closer to the sun).  The picture in the middle is DIGITALLY ENHANCED to show detail, while the picture above it is similar, but not changed.  The picture on the bottom is my personal favorite, as it displays the visible spectrum reflected by Mercury of the sun's light.

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Thomas

Amateur Astrology

My horoscope has been telling me to get into Astronomy.(JK) We have a telescope that I recently used to see the last phase of Venus before it dips into the sun's glare. I tried to get a picture using the camera pointed into the lens of the telescope. I was quite pleased at my first attempt to capture an image. I'll have to figure out a way to get it to be more steady. In spite of my lack of experience you can still clearly see the multi-colored crescent shape of Venus. Bryan