6 Months, 1 Morning Star

From the photographer: “I photographed Venus as the morning star on 81 different days between August 2023 and February 2024, as seen from the rooftop of our apartment building in Bursa, Turkey. I shot all the pictures at dawn, when the Sun was 7 degrees under the horizon.

After inferior conjunction on 13th August 2023, Venus moves out of Sun’s glare and quickly rises higher in the morning sky for the next few weeks, reaching greatest elongation on 23rd October 2023. Then Venus is seen to be drifting to the southeast while it is also getting lower in the sky, first slowly, then progressively faster. In February 2024, Venus is finally lost behind Uludağ, the mountain rising more than 2500 meters in the southeast and south of Bursa.

I used the photo from 20th October 2023 as the main image and registered others on to this master. For this final picture, I ended up using 41 of the 81 images roughly 4 days apart, although there are some uneven intervals because of weather. The animation of all 81 days can be seen here.”