Cold Hands, Warm Result

A happy New Year to you all! New for 2018 is a redesigned header I created for this Sky & Weather Photography blogsite.

Posted above is an image captured at 5:33 am CST, Saturday, January 6, 2018 at Bowman Woods Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Air temperature was -14 degrees F. This was not conducive for warm fingers operating camera settings and my mission here was to get the images taken as quickly as possible and then get back to the inviting warm environs of home! This morning the planets Jupiter and Mars were within one-third degree of each other. Both bodies were in the constellation Libra and near their maximum distance from Earth. Jupiter shown at magnitude -1.83 and Mars at 1.43. They can be seen in the main photo above, with Jupiter being the left partner. Also visible is the double star Zubenelgenubi (Alpha Librae, magnitude 2.75), right and above the planets. The brighter star at lower right is the 3.25 magnitude star Brachium. This image is a 3-second exposure at f/5.6, 1250 ISO and 70mm focal length. The 0.8-second exposure inset image seen at upper right shows the two planets zoomed-in at 300mm focal length, captured at 5:25 am. Clearly seen right of Jupiter are its four large moons. From lower left: Io (magnitude 5.84), Europa (6.12), Ganymede (5.43) and Callisto (6.48). Nikon D7200 DSLR camera.