The Phoenix Mars Lander is on Twitter … and late yesterday a tweet came through saying:
Tonight, go outside and look up at the crescent moon. That “star” just above the moon isn’t a star, it’s Mars. I’ll be waving 🙂
I went out to the hot tub around 9:30 and the sky was quite cloudy. About 10 p.m. the clouds blew away and a beautiful clear sky appeared. The crescent moon was in the western sky and a little red dot was visible to the upper right. So, I had to try out my night sky photographic capability. The image to the upper left is the best of the bunch. The moon is quite bright and getting the red dot of Mars to show causes the moon to be way overexposed. What I ended up doing is taking a picture that makes the moon come out OK and another picture making Mars kind of appear and then photoshopping the two images together. Clicking on the picture will show a full-sized image.
The other space event going on is the Space Shuttle delivering the Japanese module to the International Space Station. Someone at NASA is also on Twitter providing updates on what’s going on with that shuttle mission. Today as the astronauts were doing the 197th spacewalk, their progress was being tweeted. I find this communication very cool and very interesting! This is information coming to me that I would never get otherwise. While Twitter is going through some serious growing pains, they are truly plowing virgin and fertile ground. In a year or so this capability will be more ubiquitous than email.
For what it’s worth, I did wave back….
Nice photo, I know how hard it is to get good night sky images after trying to photograph the lunar eclipse a while back. What camera did you use?
I have a Sony A100 digital SLR camera and was using a 70-300mm zoom lens set at about 190mm so I could get Mars and the Moon into the picture. The two pictures were taken at 1 second @ f5.6 and then 1.8 seconds @f5.6. I took the moon from the first picture and pasted it into the second picture. Even though the camera was on a tripod and using delayed shutter release, a longer exposure had enough jitter in the camera to cause Mars to kind of streak. Thinking about it later, I probably needed to get off the back deck and out on the solid ground and I probably needed to shut off the anti-shake in the camera. Some more practice would be helpful, I’m sure!