The week started with some morning photography of the Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars Conjunction, and got busier from there. My photos have received a great deal of positive feedback throughout the week for which I am really humbled and grateful.

Excitement peaked again yesterday as I was fortunate enough to have my image chosen to be Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on the 26th February, which always brings a huge influx of visitors to the site.  Just over 24 hours later (since APOD published the picture), over 5,000 people have visited mikesalway.com.au, and the APOD link was also submitted to Digg where it now has over 1200 diggs.  

Whenever I submit an image for APOD, you always want it to be chosen and published, but neverexpect it. It’s always a thrill, and very exciting, to receive an email reply after so many times of receiving no reply

This makes my 5th image published on APOD, and interestingly, my first 2 APOD’s (#1, #2)were hi-res images of Jupiter, but my last 3 (#3, #4, #5) have been of conjunctions with nothing more than an entry level DSLR, a cheap Sigma lens and a tripod.

I do put a lot of effort into these shots and sometimes I’m planning them out days or weeks before hand. I guess I’ve been lucky to have captured these beautiful events with the sky putting on a special show. It is really nice, and really rewarding when the effort is recognised. It makes it all worthwhile.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me and given such great feedback on my photography.

For ages last night I sat in bed wondering where to go to photograph this marvellous sight… wondering if it would be cloudy, would it be clear, would the skies provide the same dramatic scenery as I was presented for the Smiley Face Conjunction, would I remember the spare batteries, my tripod, the remote switch, would the alarm wake me up or would I sleep through it?!

Luckily, everything came together for a beautiful morning of photography and I was able to capture some stunning images of the Moon, Jupiter, Mercury and Mars conjunction. 

Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars Conjunction at Dawn

The image above is my favourite from the session, and was taken with the Canon 20D and Sigma 17-70mm lens @ 33mm, f/5.6, 2.0s exposure @ ISO800.

Please continue reading below to see more photos of the conjunction gracing the lovely morning skies.

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Well it’s been a busy week! Starting with my Pictures of the Smiley Face Conjunction post from last week, which was linked on a number of blogs, and also Spaceweather, helped to kick-start a busy couple of days. It culminated in being featured on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day on Friday, which also included being submitted on digg.com (almost 1000 diggs at time of writing). 

As a result of all that, the stats for my blog went through the roof. The mikesalway.com.au homepage received over 4,100 visitors on Friday alone, and my Smiley Face Pictures post was viewed almost 5,000 times last week.

Thanks once again to everyone who took the time to contact me via email or by commenting on the post. All the kind words and positive encouragement has been quite humbling, and when I think that my picture has had such a positive impact on some people, it motivates me to keep going and to continue to try and reach people through my photography.

When I’ve shown my photography (both astrophotography and terrestrial photography) to family, friends or work colleagues, they’ve often said to me “Why aren’t you selling this stuff?”. It was great feedback to receive, but apart from sitting at a market stall all day on Saturdays, I didn’t know the best way to offer my photography for sale to people who really feel inspired by it – inspired enough for them to actually spend money and find a place to hang it on their wall.

Well thanks to some friends for putting me onto it, I’ve now found Red Bubble – a site where people can upload their artwork for display and/or for sale. I created an account last Thursday and uploaded some of favourite recent images.

The beauty of a site like Red Bubble, is that they take care of the ordering, printing, the framing and the postage and handling. I don’t need to worry about stock, or printing the right pictures, or printing the right sizes, or worrying about stock getting damaged, or sitting at a market stall every weekend.

So, if any of my photos move you enough to buy a card or a print, then you can now do that through my Red Bubble page. If there’s any images in my gallery that don’t appear on Red Bubble that you’d really like to get printed, then please just contact me and let me know.

One last bit of housekeeping – I’ve installed a “Related Posts” plugin for Wordpress, so now when viewing a post, you’ll see a list of related entries based on the tags, category and other criteria. Hopefully this will help you to find other interesting articles or posts here on mikesalway.com.au.

Thanks for reading.

Wow, well last night certainly proved to be more stressful than was expected! After a beautiful and clear practise run on Sunday night, it was supposed to be crystal clear on Monday night too but high cloud and then thick low cloud came in during Monday afternoon which threatened to spoil the whole event for me.

News of the rare celestial alignment had made it to all the media outlets and it got quite a bit of coverage yesterday. I gave a short interview for the local Star 104.5FM radio station, and I saw it mentioned on news.com.au, and the TV news as well.

It did clear for me, just! Here’s the first of the many images I captured. 

Smiley Face Conjunction at Sunset (HDR)

The picture above is available for purchase as a print, matted and framed, or even as a greeting card at RedBubble. Please read on to see more..

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This image of the 4 inner rocky planets (Venus, Mercury, Mars and Earth) was captured on Saturday night, 20th September, at Long Jetty on the Central Coast of NSW.

Venus, Mercury and Mars made a nice conjunction with the star Spica, forming a lovely triangle in the twilight sky. My daughter Eliza was the model on the jetty.

It was a lovely warm day but very windy. The photo was taken with my Canon 350D and Sigma 17-70mm lens, f/7.1, ISO100, 1.6s exposure.

Processing including selective enhancement of the planets, and saturation boost.

Venus, Mercury, Mars and Spica Conjunction

I was fortunate enough to have this image selected to appear on NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day (APOD) site on 30th September 2008, and I’ve received some great feedback. Eliza was embarrassed at first, but then thrilled to have the photo of her seen by hundreds of thousands of people across the world

Thanks for looking.