Lightnings, New moon, Conjunctions and more

The last week of October (2019) was very busy for me with planed and unplanned events that I photographed. 

On Saturday evening (26th) there was a thunderstorm a bit from me so most of the lightnings were far. and yet some were very close like this one.

There are several methods to capture lightnings. One way is to put a camera on tripod and set it for long exposures of 5 seconds, hoping to catch something. If the storm is heavy you can try and take a video, even with your smartphone, using the slow motion option, which works better than regular video even that it has a limited duration.

A lightning 26-Oct-2019

On Sunday I noticed lightnings in a very far cloud (70 km from me). It was very strange to see these far away lightnings within the cloud as can be seen in this short movie.

A longer version is in you tube

Tuesday (29th) was the first option to see the new moon. Stating with  a nice sunset, I spot the moon, and as a bonus Venus and Mercury were close as well.

In the photo with all three it is clearly seen that while Venus is more or less on the ecliptic, The moon is norther and Mercury is to the south.

sunset 29-Oct-2019

The new moon 29-Oct-2019

Mercury is between the wires of the antenna at the bottom left of the photo

The new moon, Venus and Mercury 29-Oct-2019

In the following photo, earthshine is visible, light reflected from the Earth to the Moon and back again to Earth make us see even the dark parts of the moon and its entire disc.

The new moon 29-Oct-2019

Just two days later a close conjunction (about 1 deg) of Jupiter and the moon

The moon and Jupiter 31-Oct-2019

And only two days later, just a few hours after the conjunction with Saturn

Moon and Saturn 2-Nov-2019

What a nice week!

More is less in photographing Iridium flares.

Yesterday (3-Feb-2019) I photoed an Iridium flare just five minutes after sunset in what was still daylight. However as you can see, I caught only half of the flare.

 Iridium flare 3 /2/2019

Here are two photos that describe the flare. The first shows its path along the state of Israel and the second one show its path in the sky. The starts are there but can't be seen of course.

Flare central line over Israel

Flare in sky

It is important to understand that in such case it is extremely important to be near he central line as possible. Even few kilometers east or west of it and the flare will not be visible. during the night one can be tens of kilometers away but not during the day.

I choose a spot on the central line and setup my camera using the smart phone compass, and about 20
seconds before the pass start to record a video.

The flare was very bright and very short, and the final result is seen in the photo at the beginning of the post.
The camera is much more sensitive than the human eye, and recorded some seconds of the flare but
unfortunately I didn't aim it to the correct spot.

So what went wrong? I wanted to use a larger focal length to capture a long and wide flare. using longer focal length require precision so it is better to use lower focal length. Also since the flare moves from top to bottom (or bottom to top), putting the camera vertically will give mush more space for errors. So more is less. More zoom, less space for errors, and I should use 50mm instead of 70mm.

To summarize here is an old video showing rare double daytime Iridium! At least I got that right!

And to finish the post, we will add a great sunset photo after the flare

sunset 3/2/2019