SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
Paolo Palma
Location of Photo:
Naples and Rome - Italy
Date/Time of photo:
July and August 2023
Equipment:
Nikon coolpix p510
Description:
I am pleased to share with you my last daylight observations and shots of the Venus sickle in the shade of centennial trees and important Italian monuments. The World around us is full of infinite beauty, but to admire that which is visible in the smallest details one needs to know where to look. So in the last weeks with the help of binoculars, I tried to look for, observe and shoot - only with a Nikon camera - the planet of love near its last inferior conjunction next to some monuments full of beauty because their overall view was like beauty added to other beauty. And I succeeded. Once I had identified the area of sky where the planet should be, it was not difficult to spot it at the foot of these giants because their shadow hid my eyes from the Sun and its glare, even when the planet was less than 10 degrees elongation from our star. How beautiful it was to observe through binoculars the thin phase of the planet touching the leaves of these immense creatures and the contours of these imposing monuments. A spectacle that has been repeating itself silently over our heads for decades and centuries and which I was now able to peek at for a few minutes through my own eyes. Once I spotted the planet, I took photos and videos zooming in ( and out ) on it and on the monument it seemed to be standing on. All these videos can be seen on my website; instead this is a composite image summarising a part of the result so far. They were not all taken at the same time, yet the sequence of them shows the variation of Venus' phases from before, during and after the inferior conjunction of the 13th August. I hope to enrich my collection in the next weeks with other images.
