Last night, the Moon and Jupiter snuggled up in the sky, coming within 29 arcminutes of each other. This will be the closest conjunction of these two bodies in the sky until 2026. The waxing gibbous Moon and the gas giant planet made for a great pair in the western night sky, and some astrophotographers, like Giuseppe Petricca in the image above, were also able to capture some of the Moons of Jupiter as well.
See more images from around the world, below.
Sergio Gorbach, from Buenos Aires, Argentina sent us this image, showing how he was in a region where the conjunction turned into an occulation. “This captures the moment when about half of Jupiter was behind the dark part of the disk of the moon,” Sergio wrote via email. “On the scope three of the Galilean moons where visible, but not on this picture, unfortunately. The picture quality is not great since they were taken by a smartphone held by hand in front of the eyepiece of my (cheap) telescope, but the resulting image is not that bad.”
Not bad indeed!
Dave Hudson took this great shot on Tuesday, January 21, 2013 @ 10:32pm EST.
Camera and Telescope: Celestron C8 on a Celestron CG5 EQ mount
Canon 60D using Eyepiece projection with MAXIM adapter and Celestron .63 Focal Reducer
17mp picture, ISO 100, 1/60 second exposure, no filters
Telescope: 203.2 mm aperture, 2000mm focal length, F10 – reduced to F6.3 using Celestron Focal Reducer
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