Astronomy Picture of the Day: Venus Just After Sunset (dial up warning!)

[beam me up scottie]

Venus Just After Sunset
Credit & Copyright: Tunç Tezel

Explanation: Is that Venus or an airplane? A common ponderable for sky enthusiasts is deciding if that bright spot near the horizon is the planet Venus. Usually, an airplane will show itself by moving significantly in a few moments. Venus will set only slowly as the Earth turns. Still, the identification would be easier if Venus did not keep shifting its position each night. Pictured above, Venus was captured 38 different nights during 2005 and 2006 over Bursa, Turkey, when Earth's sister planet appeared exclusively in the evening sky. The average spacing of the images was about five days, while the images were always taken with the Sun about 7 degrees below the horizon. Venus' orbit around the Sun will now confine it to Earth's morning sky until October 2006.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060201.html

[Wilms]

1. That's neat. n/t

[ClintonTyree]

2. So those exact same lights were on in those buildings..........

for 38 consecutive nights? Something seems a little odd about that.

[mainegreen]

3. And clouds move very slowly in turkey, don't they?

:P

[htuttle]

4. The lights in the buildings would be 'cumulative' on the film

In other words, if someone turned on their light for long enough one night, it would burn the image of the window onto the film exposure. Subsequent nights when the same light was shut off would not 'erase' the image of the window light from the film.

[benburch]

5. Nope.

But you add together the images and you get a averaged view of the buildings.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. That's one steady tripod!

This guy MUST live alone, if his camera was set up in the same place and didn't move for something like 190 days (over 6 months!).

He doesn't live with cats, for sure.

[Orsino]

7. Over on the APOD board, the opinion seems to be...

...that only one image of the buildings and clouds was taken, and superimposed upon all the separate Venus images. This makes sense, but is not obvious from the description of the process.