Uranus & Venus (01-22-09)

Tonight there was a close conjunction of Uranus & Venus. Seeing them together is interesting because Venus is 67 million miles from the sun, but Uranus is, on average, 1.78 billion miles from the sun. At the time this pictures was taken, Venus was between 80 and 100 million miles from Earth, and Uranus was at least about 1.8 billion miles behind it. When we look at the two planets, we are looking back in time. Sunlight took 6 minutes to get to Venus and then 8 or 9 minutes to get from Venus to my camera. But sunlight took 2.65 hours to get to Uranus and another 2.65 hours to get back to my camera. So the light from Venus is 14 minutes old and the light from Uranus is over 5 hours old. If the sun ceased to shine all at once, folks on earth would learn about the sun's darkness a little over 8 minutes after it happened. But even after the sun ceased shining here on earth, Venus would shine for another six minutes, and Uranus would glow for about another 5 hours!

Three of these are 15 seconds with the Canon 400D through the AT66ED with the 0.8x field flattener II. The darker image is only 8 seconds.