Photo of the Week for August 22, 2014
The August 18 close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter was a tempting subject for photographers, including Gerhard Salhenegger. Setting up his camera at Gold Lake, north of Buckhorn and Peterborough, Ontario, the weather initially didn’t look promising. “At first I could only see Fomalhaut — everything else was covered with thick clouds,” Gehard reports. “I waited, and luckily the cloud cover in the east lifted just when Venus and Jupiter were rising and got to see and photograph this rare view.”
When the opportunity arose, Gerhard didn’t reach for a DSLR, rather, he used his Canon PowerShot SX50 — a small-sensor camera with a big lens. While a DSLR generally produces a more detailed, less noisy image, the strength of Gehard’s Canon “bridge” camera is its versatility. For the main photo above, the camera’s zoom lens was set to 76mm (equivalent to about 425mm in a full-frame camera), and the inset was cropped from an image made with the lens zoomed to the equivalent of a 1,200mm telephoto. Notice that three of Jupiter’s moons are visible in the close-up.
