Camping beneath the stars…

The Conjunction might be over, but Venus and Jupiter are still on view, and Stella and I had a great view of them at the end of last week when we went camping, at the rather pretty Waterside campsite on the shore of Ullswater. I hadn’t intended taking any more planet pictures – see previous post – but the night sky was so clear and dark there that it would have been stoopid not to…!

It was our first time using an electric hook-up (thanks Carol and Simon for the use of your cable!) and we were hoping for a quiet spot, without too many people around us… that worked out pretty well…

(Ah, but on the other side of the hedge to the left there was the “Family Field”, full of tents and mobile homes echoing to the barks of dogs and the nsane shouts and yells of demon-obsessed children, so it wasn’t quite as peaceful as it looked..!)

After dark, the sky was gloriously dark and starry, with just a little light pollution coming up from nearby Penrith but nowhere near enough to spoil things. Walking around the lake we came across one twisted, skeletal, wind-bent tree after another, like some bizarre kind of open air modern art sculpture gallery, but it was still too light to see Venus and Jupiter. On the way back to our tent, however, the sky had darkened enough to allow the two planets to pop into view, and here are the pictures I took…