Conjoin? Well, not exactly. But I don’t recall ever seeing the planets closer together in the sky than they were the night of June 30, 2015. They were both near the center of my FOV in my favorite macro lens:
Truth be told, I’d forgotten all about this conjunction of Venus and Jupiter until my father-in-law reminded me. I went out in the backyard and shot this handheld with a lens designed for close-up work. (An astronomical conjunction is not the same thing as an eclipse or occultation, where the nearer object covers up the closer; technically they just have to have the same position on one of the two celestial coordinate axes, right ascension or declination.)
The normal shooting distance to subject with this lens is about 30 centimeters. I wasn’t able to get my camera that close to Venus or Jupiter last night. (Guess I’m just lazy.) Closest approach of Venus is 38 million kilometers, and last night it was 77 million kilometers away according to my planetarium software. Jupiter never gets any closer to Earth than 365 million kilometers, and was over 900 million kilometers distant last night.
Here’s the full field of view from the photo above, without the processing to darken the background:
Will try again tonight if I can scrounge up a tripod. Then I can lower the ISO and try for longer exposures.
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