Astronomy

How cool is this? Tonight (yesterday as I write this) we had a sliver (crescent) moon and two planets in close proximity: Venus and Jupiter, giving the appearance of a smiley face in the sky. Here's some photos I took on my new camera -- without a tripod. I do have a very old and slightly wonky tripod somewhere, but I'm not sure where it was. Image stabilisation helped me handhold (with the help of a post) with a 1.6 second shutter speed. These aren't perfect shots by any means but for handheld, they're pretty amazing. So we have the regular shot showing the smiley face, the close up, where you can see the moon's disc (and a ghost of it -- some kind of interference), and then one with a reflection, though it's too dark to see the water.