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Friday, August 31, 2007

Astronomy: Conjunction of Vesta and Jupiter

After two days of utterly foul weather, I was blessed with clear skies for the night of the closest approach of asteroid 4 Vesta to Jupiter. The picture at the right, taken around 22:15 local time (20:15 UTC) on 2007-08-30 shows Vesta at the top, with Jupiter and its moons Callisto, Io, and Europa at the bottom.

Click on the picture to see the larger image from which it was cropped, which also shows the star ω Ophiuchi. You can compare this image with the ones taken on 2007-08-25 and 2007-08-28 to observe the approach of Vesta to Jupiter.

Like the earlier pictures, this was taken with a Nikon D200 digital SLR with an 18–200mm zoom lens at the maximum of 200mm (equivalent to a 300mm lens on a 24×36mm film camera) at f/5.6 with sensitivity set to ISO 1600 and exposure time of 2 seconds.

Posted at August 31, 2007 14:29