I wanted to share a few more photos from my take Friday night of the crescent moon, Mars and Venus setting over the Union Baptist Church steeple.

I did not set-out looking for that photo. I'd been forwarded a tip earlier in the day about the celestial confluence, but had been too busy with my other assignments and duties to give it much thought.

Only later in the evening when I spied the three heavenly bodies in close proximity fairly high in the night sky did I refer back to the e-mail and realize what I'd almost missed.

With my evening errands finished (my work shift long since over) I started the task of finding the right landmark and the right location. It's not an easy thing to find. A full moon rise can be easier because the moon as it comes over the eastern horizon is often magnified by the earth's atmosphere and looks quite a bit larger than when it gets higher in the night sky.

For this photo though I would need something, such as a church steeple, that rose well above the horizon, and also where I could get a spot on lower ground that was far enough distant to get the perspective right. Since I was in Mystic and would not have time to really cruise the region for the right spot, the Union Baptist Church steeple won almost by default.

The location required a lot of driving (it was too cold to walk anyway) up and down the river looking for just the right spot. I finally settled on the sidewalk on Cottrell St. at the back corner of the Mystical Toys building. This gave me a clean look at the steeple, the sky and the moon and planets.

<hardreturn>The next trick was finding the patience to wait in the cold for the three objects to finally drop (or, technically, for the earth to turn enough) close enough to the steeple to fit in the frame.<br class="hardreturn" /><hardreturn>I used a Nikon D4s camera with a 300mm f2.8 super telephoto lens to get the compression I wanted between the earthbound steeple and the quite distant planetary bodies.<br class="hardreturn" />

<hardreturn>From there it was a question of making a variety of small adjustments. I changed the ISO setting on the camera to try a variety of shutter speed and aperture settings. I set the lens on a tripod (with a lens that big you put the lens on the tripod and the camera just hangs off the lens) so I could use longer time exposures in order to get the greater depth of field with a smaller aperture setting.<br class="hardreturn" />

<hardreturn>Fairly early on I decided I was getting too much digital noise from the higher ISO settings and opted for lower ISO and longer exposures. This led to a slight blurring of the planets but the steeple remained quite sharp as did the moon.<br class="hardreturn" /><hardreturn>I did try a few frames from across Cottrell St. This allowed me to get a little more of the church building, but also included some power lines that had been over my head to cut through the frame. In the dark they are nearly invisible, but in one of the frames shared you can notice the linear distortion of them.<br class="hardreturn" />

<hardreturn>And finally, the moon dipped into the treeline on the hill and it was time to get my now quite stiff and numb fingers back into the warm car and head home to send the photos back to the paper for publication.<br class="hardreturn" />