Another 2017 Badlands Celestial Conjunction Offering

Friday, June 2, 2023



My image of a line up of planets, the moon and a bright star from Badlands National Park in South Dakota on September 18, 2017 was probably the most well-received of any photo I've ever taken. I recently discovered a similar and unprocessed image from my Adobe Lightroom library, and it is posted here. The setup for this event was purely coincidental and lucky because the conjunction was unbeknownst to me. My wife and I were out in the remote and dark sky area of Door Trail to photograph the Milky Way in the other part of the sky (this was amazing too), setting up here about 3:00 am MDT. After capturing the Milky Way images we decided to stay and wait for the sunrise. As the sky brightened in the east, a beautiful array of celestial objects rose ahead of the sun. They were, in the image above, from bottom-to-top: planet Mercury, planet Mars, the Moon, star Regulus, planet Venus. Magnitudes for the objects were: Mercury (-0.92), Mars (1.82), the Moon (-9.10), Regulus (1.34), Venus (-3.94). This image, captured at 5:44 am, is a one second exposure at f/6.3, ISO 400, 38mm focal length. Shining faintly left and above of Venus were the stars Algieba (left) and Eta Leonis in the constellation Leo. Nikon D7200 camera.

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