The Moon, Venus, and Mercury on March 22nd, 2004

The crescent Moon (with Earthshine), Venus, and Mercury produced a nice show in the western sky at sunset during the latter half of March, 2004. 

March 22nd was a very clear evening, and I captured the three solar system objects with my Pentax Optio 550 digital camera from my balcony. Venus is the bright "star" near the top center, and Mercury is a much fainter "star" to the lower right of the crescent Moon.

The exposure was 2 sec @ f/4.5, with a 37 mm equivalent focal length. The exposure time was 18:58:08 EST.

 The next evening (March 23, 2004), I captured a time-lapse sequence of Mercury, the Moon, and Venus setting over Arlington. The time-lapse sequence was assembled from 99 individual digital photos obtained at 1 minute intervals, and turned into a 15 frames per second movie using QuickTime. The two files below are the same movie; the smaller version is 440 horizontal pixels, and the larger is 1024 horizontal pixels. A fairly good computer is needed to run the 1024-pixel version smoothly. Look closely and you can see Mercury setting. The Moon and Venus are more obvious.