Quote:
On 2003-01-14 16:01, Kiwi wrote:
Could Venus have shown in any of the Lunar surface photos?
It's now 10:07am and I was looking at Venus about 20 minutes ago, high in our northern sky, where it is easy to see with the naked eye. This means it can be photographed with an exposure suitable for sunlight.
I've found figures for it as follows --
Apollo 11: Mag -4.1 43 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 12: Mag -3.9 16 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 14: Mag -4.3 46 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 15: Mag -3.9 7 degrees west of Sun
Apollo 16: Mag -4.4 45 degrees east of Sun
Apollo 17: Mag -4.0 28 degrees west of Sun
Haven't worked out yet whether these mean it was visible from the landing sites.
Has anyone done any research on this?
[Fixed typo.]
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kiwi on 2003-01-14 16:03 ]</font>
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I checked on several of the landings by the simple expedient of running "Starry Night Pro", feeding it the correct lunar locations and times, and seeing what was visible. I don't recall spotting any of the planets (except Earth, naturally) but I did spot Vega. And I found one Apollo photograph which may actually *show* Vega! It's tricky, because most of the photos also have some smudges and other image artifacts which can confuse. (Especially for lazy people like me who just pull the compressed .jpgs off of NASA's website instead of getting higher quality prints to work with.) And you have to kind of guess on the camera's direction and field of view, without any real references for that information. But it's cool to think about anyway. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]