With clear weather last evening, Barbara and I headed to Elena Gallegos Open Space overlooking Albuquerque from the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. We chose this location to capture the “Christmas Star”, so named because the conjunction of planets Jupiter and Saturn appear so close together on 21 December that they appear to be a large star. The view to the planets is to the Southwest, the same as the view of the city of Albuquerque.
The 1st photo is the general view of the shoot location using 2 bracketed exposures – one for the foreground at 1/16th second shutter, and one for the sky at 1/160th second. Nikon Z6, Nikon 24-70 lens at 24 mm, manual mode, ISO 400, aperture f/4.
The 2nd photo shows the conjunction of the stars approximately as seen by the naked eye. It too was captured with my 24-70 zoom lens set at 33mm. Exposure settings were ISO 100, aperture f/2.8, and shutter speed 1/2 second.
The 3rd photo was taken with the longest focal length lens that I own, a Nikon f/2.8 70-200 zoom lens at 200mm. Exposure settings were ISO 1000, aperture f/2.8, and shutter speed 3 seconds. Even with a 200mm lens, the planets appear as small dots in the viewfinder, which makes focusing very difficult. And even though the planets appear to be close together, in reality they are still 450 million miles apart, so it is virtually impossible to obtain a sharp focus on both Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings in the same photograph.
It was an enjoyable evening and another opportunity to Capture the Memories Found in Travel and Life.
The 3rd photo
