Today’s Italian OPOD goes to Soumyadeep Mukherjee for having daily captured the formation of the Jupiter-Venus conjunction during the different twilights.
Author’s description: The image is a composite collage of 30 days of Venus-Jupiter, coming closer to each other till their conjunction on 9th June. Starting from 11th May, each slice of the collage was captured every day, till 9th June. On most of the days, the images were captured during civil twilight in order to showcase the varying colours of the twilight sky along with the planets. However, on some occasions, due to the presence of clouds, images were captured during nautical and astronomical twilight. During capturing the images, the camera was kept level to the horizon, and the planets were placed right in the middle of the frame (as much as possible). The images were captured with the same camera, the same lens, at the same focal length. The processing involves cropping all the images and placing the planets equidistant from the centre to show their movement with respect to one another.
The different colours of the sky during the various daily shots are very interesting. The sky changes colour because of how sunlight passes through the atmosphere.
At dawn and at sunset, when the Sun is low on the horizon and the light must cross a much longer layer of atmosphere. Much of the blue light is scattered away, while the red, orange and pink tones reach our eyes more easily.
In short: the Sun produces the light, while the atmosphere largely decides what colour we see.
The basic physical cause is the elastic scattering of light by molecules in the atmosphere, called Rayleigh scattering.
📷 Photo Title: “Closer, everyday”
Equipment: Nikon Z6II, Sigma 50mm f/1.4, Benro Rhino Tripod
Exif: Varied Shutter Speed (1/30s - 5s), f/5.6, ISO 400
📍 Location: Kolkata India
🔬 Phenomenon: conjunction and sky colours
⭐ Observation difficulty: medium
Column curated by Marco Meniero and Marcella Botti.
