The waxing 3-day-old Moon in twilight with Earthshine on the dark side of the Moon. Note the “Baily’s Beads” of bright peaks catching the morning sunlight around the lunar south pole. This is an HDR blend of 5 exposures in Camera Raw, to bring out the faint Earthshine while retaining detail in the bright sunlit crescent. Taken April 25, 2020 with the 130mm Astro-Physics refractor at f/6 and Canon EOS Ra camera at ISO 100.
A train of Starlinks on April 18, 2020, from the 5 batch launched a month earlier on March 18, 2020, in procession across the south in the darkening twilight, from home in Alberta. This is one frame from 100 shot this evening as they appeared in a long train over more than an hour. Many were magnitude +1. However, two nights later most appeared 2 t 3 magnitudes fainter and were hard to photograph and, except for a few, were not easy to pick out to the naked eye. An attempt to record a time-lapse on April 20 didn’t record many. This is a single 4-second exposure at f/2.2 with the 14mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800.
Venus above the Pleiades star cluster, M45, on April 4, 2020, in the twilight and moonlight. Light from the gibbous Moon illuminated the sky so no long exposure would reveal much detail in and around the Pleiades. Venus passes close to the Pleiades only every 8 years. It was closer the night before, but alas, there were clouds! This is a stack of 5 x 30-second exposures with the SharpStar 76mm EDPH apo refractor with the 0.8x flattener/reducer for f/4.4, and at ISO 400 with the Canon EOS Ra. Taken earlier in the night with twilight still present. A version with the 140mm apo refractor shows a closer view from this same night.
