The Conjunction

For the next couple of nights, Venus and Jupiter are incredibly close to each other.  This is called a Conjunction.  Tuesday night they will be closer, but the forecast is for clouds, so I was lucky to see this tonight.  It was a beautiful sight with the naked eye, and even better in my telescope.  But I used a telephoto lens on my camera to get this view.  It was a 300mm lens on my Nikon D300, so the effective focal length was 450mm.  In the telescope you could see both the bands on the planet Jupiter, and four of Jupiter's moons.  And Venus was stunning because it is in its crescent phase - It looks like a four-day old crescent moon.  The scene was quite magical.  Venus is the brighter of the two planets in the picture.