Failed Venus transit

Ok, so I got up early to try and see the Venus transit from sunrise. As you can see in the photo it was a bit cloudy at the horizon and clear sky above. Actually if the photo had shown more above me it would've shown a completely clear sky above my head. Unfortunately the Sun is not above my head at sunrise. The clouds moved from North to South which meant the Sun was behind the clouds pretty much the whole time. It was also too windy to project the Sun onto a piece of white paper. Excuses, excuses, excuses. Truth is I should've been more prepared and gotten a piece of welder glass or some "eclipse glasses" so I at least could've seen the transit in the gaps between the clouds, but hey, only 105 years until next time. I'm sure I will have been able to prepare for it by then...

Yes I know there are a lot of trees in the way in the photo, but I was on my way back from a big open field (a.k.a. a golf course) when I took it.

Astrophotography

One of my biggest interest has always been astronomy. The emptiness of space is fascinating to me. Especially the night sky on a clear night is amazing to look at. The next step then is of course to try and take photos of it.
There are a few ways to do that. You can use a wide angle lens and get whole constellations in the photo. You can use a telephoto lens (for example all photos in this blog post is taken with my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L lens and then I've cropped out a lot of the black surrounding the object I wanted) and get a single object. Or you can use a telescope to get even more magnification.

The moon is always a good place to start when trying to take photos of objects in the night sky. Not only does it change appearance every day, it's easy to see the "oceans" and craters with the naked eye. It's also the brightest object in the night sky.

Further away Venus is really bright. Our closest planet neighbour. It's the second brightest object in the night sky. Sometimes, like in this photo, you can see it in the west after sunset and sometimes you can see it in the east before sunrise. It's breathtaking to imagine that if Venus had had an atmosphere like the one we have here on Earth then there could've been life on Venus. It's almost the same size as Earth too so if there was no life we could've colonized it.

Then we have Jupiter. The massive gas giant. The third brightest object in the night sky. Seen here in a photo with its four largest moons. With my telescope I can actually see some of the bands and the red spot. However I have no equipment to attach my camera to the telescope so I can't take those kinds of photos... yet.

Occasionally the Moon passes close to one of the planets. On one such occasion I was able to take this photo. You can see the Moon in the upper right corner and the small dot in the lower left corner is Jupiter.

Of course it's not just in the night sky that you can see objects in the sky. I took this photo of the sun just minutes before sunset one day when it was a thick fog and cloudy.






I don't have that much chances to take good photos of constellations. Even though I have a wide angle lens I live in a small city. That means the sky is always polluted with light from the street lights and cars and stuff like that. I have a list of constellations that I do want to take photos of. Oh and I would love to take a photo of the Milky Way someday. When I do I'm sure you will see the photos here on this blog.