For the month, we are very fortunate to have a beautiful conjunction between Venus and Jupiter. I managed to snap this shot on Friday night:

Venus is at the top, and Jupiter is at the bottom.

Just tonight, I noticed that the moon was beautifully aligned with these two planets. Here is the first image I got:

It was about 9:00 pm local time (Eastern Daylight Time), looking west. I like the subtle blue gradations of the sky and the way the trees frame the bottom of the picture. All of that is serendipity, of course; I was able to plan none of that.

Here’s a bit of a close-up:

You can start to see a bit of lens aberration in Venus and the moon in that shot. Here’s an even closer one:

You can really see the lens aberration, but you can also see the dark side of the moon. Not bad for a cheap 7.2 megapixel camera (a Samsung S730 I bought five years ago) and a twenty dollar tripod. Some day I’ll have a much nicer camera and take better pictures—for some reason I enjoy hooking up cameras to microscopes and telescopes—but for now, I’m quite happy that I’m able to get these pictures.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.