Friday, February 1, 2019

Gorgeous Cold Morning

Thursday morning was really cold.

It was 430am and I was following my morning workday ritual.  I loaded my backpack, my running gear, and lunch box into the back of the car and then pressed the button to open the garage.

As I always do, I stepped into the driveway and took a survey of the sky.

No clouds.  It was clear.

Holy cow!  Venus, the Moon, and Jupiter were having a conjunction.  It was beautiful.  I stood there staring at it for a few moments.

On a lark, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.  Honestly, I didn't expect much.  It was dark and it was a phone camera, afterall.  And then, I remembered that my phone, a Google Pixel 3XL, has a "Night Sight" mode for the camera.

I framed the image of the sky on the screen and pushed the button to take the photo.  The camera app put up a little message, "Hold still."

I held still.

A few moments later, this image appeared.


Venus, Moon, and Jupiter Conjunction
In it, you can clearly see Venus to the left of the Moon, with Jupiter to the right.  And a smattering of other stars.  On the right side of the image, the constellation, Scorpio stands out.

It's not great astrophotography, but is a pretty good image from a phone!

Below, I labeled the visible stars.

Labeled

With these images, you can click on them to see their larger versions.

Enjoy!



2 comments:

  1. I'm pretty surprised you can get a nighttime photo through a cellphone, cool.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Night Sight" is pretty awesome. It's made possible by Google's machine learning and is only available on Pixel devices. The other phone manufacturers are playing "catch-up."

      Delete

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