Moon-Venus-M45 Conjunction (June 23, 2006)
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On July 23, 2006, the Moon, the planet Venus, and the large and famous open cluster M45 (The Pleiades) appeared in the morning sky about a half hour before the Sun rose. I captured it (not very well) with a 104 mm (166 mm equivalent) lens.
| Object | Conjunction Between Moon, Venus, and M45 |
| Common Name | Conjunction Between Moon, Venus, and the Pleiades |
| Date, Time, & Moon | June 23, 2006 @ 4:30 AM; 6% Moon |
| Location | SBO Telescope at CU Boulder |
| Optics | 104 mm; f/5.4 camera lens |
| Camera | Canon Digital Rebel 350D XT |
| Exposure Time | Base: 5.5 minutes; 11 30-second frames stacked; ISO 100 Diffraction Spikes: 1.5 minutes; 3 30-second frames stacked; ISO 100 |
| Optical Correction | No Dark-Correction; 2-D polynomial flatframe corrections |
| Camera Position | Clock Drive Mount |
| Guiding | Passive Clock Drive |
| Processing Details | IDL - Flatframe correction and image addition PhotoShop CS - Alignment, Levels Adjustment, Unsharp Mask, and Gaussian Blur |
| Magnitude Depth | Complete to 8.5th. |
| Field of View | approx. 17.0° by 11.3° |
| Notes | Unfortunately, this conjunction became visible just a few minutes before a very long twilight. Over the course of the 10 minutes that I took the images used for this, the recorded light level on the camera more than doubled. While this was processed out in flatfield corrections and normalization to a standard luminosity, it meant that I couldn't take long exposures (maxed at 30 seconds), otherwise the sky would overpower the objects. |