Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Conjunction of the Moon, Venus and Mercury (and some geese!)

On the 2nd March, in the period of continued settled weather, we had a nice conjuction of the Moon, Venus and Mercury:-

 

This picture was taken at 18:14 UT about 20 minutes after sunset. The Moon is just 2 days old and a thin crescent. Venus is the bright object to the right of the Moon. The planet Mercury, which never strays very far from the Sun, can just about be made out to the lower right and just above some geese that happened to fly into my view! I used my Sony DSC-RX100 and an exposure of 1/40s, f/3.5 at ISO 1600. The equivalent SLR focal length was 58mm.

On this date Mercury was at an elongation of 16 degrees east and was magnitude -1.0 (compared to -4.8 for Venus). It reached greatest elongation on March 8th.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
  • The Owl and the Surfboard
    Last night we were lucky enough to have some clear skies in the early part of the evening and, although there was a nearly first quarter moo...
  • Geminid Meteor Shower 13th December 2022
    Two weeks ago we had the Geminid meteor shower which peaked over the night of the 13th/14th December. The moon on this date was waning gibbo...
  • TX and AH Draconis
    I thought I would have another go at some more variable stars on Monday (the 25th April) to see if I could come up with some more magnitude ...