A surprise and more photos

On Thursday I had such a great surprise: Carl Hergenrother from the Transient Sky blog published one of my photos of the beautiful conjunction taking place these days. See his post with my photo here. Today (Friday) he wrote again about the conjunction and included another photo taken by me, where you can see the fading asteroid Vesta near Venus, Mars and Saturn (worth saying that I found Vesta in the photo two days after it was taken, it was a nice coincidence to find it there).

So today I decided to take more photos and went to the same place where I took some photos on Tuesday.

I took around 50 photos, but most of them are crap. Here are the best shots I got:

- Photo 1 has Belo Horizonte's landscape with the four planets: Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury. This was a few minutes after the sunset.

- Photo 2 was taken from behind a tree and got a nice result: Mercury is a few degrees over one of the leaves.

- In photo 3 you can notice the light and air pollution from Belo Horizonte :( this is only one of the bad sides of living in a big city.

The last photo has the landscape of the city with the conjunction again. I also liked the composition of Mercury, Denebola and Vindemiatrix.

I am looking forward to observing this again next week, because the Moon will be part of the show! On Aug 12th and 13th it will be a few degrees from the planets. See the sky map below from Stellarium for Aug 13th, 10:15pm UTC (6h15 local time).

Since I am feeling better from my nose surgery, I will finish the Friday night with some beers now :-)


UPDATE: While drinking one bottle of beer Therezopolis, I found Vesta in one of the pictures. See it here. You can compare to the sky map below:

Now I can go back to my beers.