March of the Snowflakes

Last Thursday, we had a surprise March snowstorm in the "banana belt" of Tualatin. Certainly, these winter camellia blossoms did not expect it.

Maisy, on the other hand, took it well in stride:



Two days later, it was a balmy spring day. The only tangible memory of snow was photographs, an occasional not-yet-fully-melted snowman, and some trees damaged by the heavy wet snow which combined gravitational forces with spring blossoms.

All in all, March is living up to its reputation as a month of unsettled weather. And, it only has a few days left to go "out like a lamb." :-)

Jupiter and Venus, Shoulder-to-Shoulder

Two bright dots in the sky, very close to each other. Perhaps you saw the Jupiter and Venus Show after sunset last week (Tuesday for this shot). Maybe you even trained your binoculars on the conjunction, and observed that both planets could fit into the same field of view. If your binoculars were on a tripod, or you had one of the fancy new Image Stabilized models, you would have seen three or four tiny pinpricks of light next to Jupiter. Of course, those were moons of Jupiter.



What was fun about this scene was seeing five planetary bodies in the same view (click on the image for a bigger view; click here for full-resolution):



FWIW, the 13-frame stack was shot at 0.5 seconds, f/5.6, 300mm (480mm equivalent), ISO 800. Stacking was done using Registax v5 with three alignment points.

In this 2010 posting, I showed a scene with Jupiter and its moons, our Moon, and Uranus off to the side. That one was admittedly more picturesque. But today's blog entry is about the two brightest planets getting so close in the sky that they were posing for a side-by-side photo. On Thursday, March 15 the planets were even closer, but the Oregon cloudscape denied me the privilege of seeing it. In May, the two planets are scheduled for another shoulder-to-shoulder photo-op; maybe then. :-)

Update, 26-Sep-2014: Click here for my posting two years later when Venus and Jupiter finally posed close enough for a shot that nicely shows the two planets with Jupiter's moons.