Good News on the foxes Venus and Jupiter

Venus

 2024-03-08

In mid March, Venus was released back into the wild! She has been completely cured of her mange and has regained use of her hind legs after months of excellent care and hard work by her rehabilitators. Now starts a new chapter in her life as a healthy young fox! 

Here is a short video of her release: 

 

Jupiter

More good news!  Jupiter, Venus' brother, was sighted on April 9th looking in good health and running with ease.  He has survived the winter and although his mange is not 100% cured, he is in good shape considering.

You can see the transformation of these two kits by checking out these previous posts:

Venus and Jupiter

Update on Venus in November

Saturn and Jupiter conjunction

Tonight is the night!!  Alas, the clouds are spoiling the fun of seeing the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter so I am consoling myself by doing this post with photos that I took last week on December 17th.

Captions are below each photo.  Please click on the photo to enlarge it.

Here is the lovely crescent Moon showing "earth shine", which illuminates the darkened area, and on the far right near the bottom of the image you can see Saturn above and Jupiter below.  

Here you see a close up of the two planets and even two of Jupiter's moons.  You can also notice that Jupiter shows as a circle (sphere) whereas Saturn's shape is elongated indicating the rings around the planet. 

More astronomical sights

After having managed to photograph Venus and The Pleiades recently, I thought I would post a few more night sky images.

(Please note that you can enlarge a photograph by clicking on it).

In late March the planet Venus could be seen above the beautiful crescent Moon as shown below.

Another exciting event was the conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter.  These planets aligned in mid-April and I took the following photograph on April 16 around 4:50 a.m.  I do not usually get up so early but I figured this was worth it!

And finally, this was the biggest surprise for me! When I directly focused on Jupiter, I was astonished to find that its largest moons were visible and clearly identifiable as distinct bodies around the planet.