fbpx

Click the photo to resize for your screen. Scroll to the bottom for image details.

An astrophoto of the conjunction of the moon, Venus, and the Pleiades over the Saskatchewan landscape

Cosmic Meeting – 2020

Back in January, I was exploring Stellarium for potential astrophotography deepscapes for the upcoming year. I had a couple of potentials jotted down (including this Rho Ophiuchi photo), and as I progressed to March I found this opportunity to photograph the Pleiades, Moon, and Venus. It’s not often you can photograph the conjunction of two space objects with a telephoto lens with the landscape so the likelihood of finding a date when you could photograph the conjunction of three space objects with the landscape was minuscule. I quickly jotted March 28th down and worked on finding a foreground that would work. 

It had to be in a dark sky, I needed to ensure that I gave the Pleiades a chance to shine by finding some Class 1/2 skies where light pollution wasn’t going to hinder that detail, especially with a 19% illuminated moon already washing out some of it. After scouring Google Earth, I found this tree near Avonlea, Saskatchewan and planned to check it out before March. Well, I never got there. Life got busy and I couldn’t justify the 3 hours of driving to go scouting. So as March 28th drew near and the weather forecast turned in my favour with clear(ish) skies, I felt unprepared. I thought long and hard of a location that would work better, but ultimately couldn’t. So on the night of the 28th, I headed to this location sight unseen (when I called to get permission the day before, the landowner said the tree was still standing). Thankfully, because of tools like PlanIt, I was able to get myself into the right position to photograph this. This was certainly a challenging shoot due to the brightness of the moon and Venus but I’m happy with what I was able to capture that night. If you’re curious to find out more about the story, I filmed an astrovlog from this night that can be found here

To purchase a luxury fine art print of this photo please use the button below.