The King and Queen Planet Do A Dance

I've been looking forward to tonight for the entire month. 24 days ago I serendipitously made a search on planet conjunctions (when two planets have an apparent pass near each other). To my excitement Jupiter and Venus would do this exact thing at the end of June 2015. It's nearly impossible if you've been outside in early evening this month not to have noticed the two bright dots growing steadily closer together in the low western sky. Since Venus' orbit is short it only ever is visible in early morning or early evening. Here is what it looked like tonight to the naked eye.

Once the sun is down the clock is ticking if you want to see this phenomenon. It follows close behind the sun below the horizon so there wasn't much time to get the telescope set. I had already pulled the observatory roof back, but I didn't have the telescope aligned. I began trying to get my scope aligned, but was getting a hardware malfunction. Since my time was running short I decided to run the alignment manually. Normally I'd spend the hour or more to get the problem ironed out, but I didn't want to miss getting a good photo. By the time I was ready to take a shot the King and Queen planet were already beginning to dip into the trees in the above picture. I didn't have any time to get the exposure balanced and the focus sharp. I just had to snap a shot if I wanted to get anything. To my eye, the two planets were clear in the eyepiece, it's unfortunate that I was unable to spend the time I needed to get a great shot, but I'm still happy with what I got.

The cluster of dots at the top is Jupiter and his visible moons Ganymede, Europa, Lo, and Callisto. The bottom bright spot is Venus. It's often called the sister planet to Earth because of her similar composition and size. She's super bright partly because her atmosphere full of shiny sulfuric acid clouds. Below is a labeled diagram of Jupiter and his moons from my stellarium software.

It was an enjoyable couple of hours. My wife and brother-in-law came and sat in the yard and talked as I went full nerd. Looking at the stars is such a great reminder of the amazing creation we have been allowed to enjoy.