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We have only taken six photos on Venus. Here they are

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Although our celestial neighbor seems to be convenient for exploration, there are only a handful of photos ever taken on Venus’s surface. Its world is hostile, with scorching heat and harsh pressure which destroy almost any lander that touches it.

However, four spacecraft survived to tell the story of Venus and successfully returned to Earth. It was way back in the 1870s and 1890s, and these landers have been the only ones to take photos of Venus up close and personal. In this article, we bring you these photos, along with some fun facts about Venus that you may not have known.

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This gorgeous collage shows ten days of rare alignment of Venus and Jupiter

For the last couple of weeks, we were lucky to see a relatively rare phenomenon in the night sky. Venus and Jupiter were dancing in the sky, getting closer and closer as if they were flirting. Their “kiss,” or the conjunction, took place on March 2 and it was a real treat for astrophotographers and stargazers.

Indian photographer Soumyadeep Mukherjee captured the whole process in a marvelous set of photos. He turned it into a collage that shows us the dance of Venus and Jupiter, one step at a time.

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NASA shares first-ever visible light images of Venus’s surface

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has treated us with some stunning photos so far (like that time when it “touched” the Sun). But now, its cameras have turned to Venus.

The probe has taken its first-visible light images of the surface of Venus. And not only it’s Parker’s first, but this is the first-ever photo of our neighboring planet taken in the light that the human eye can see.

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Astrophotographers: The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will form a smiley face in the sky next month

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UPDATE: there will be no smiley in the sky tonight. What we thought of as a smiley, will be a rare conjunction (close pairing) of Venus and Mercury.

As Forbes points out, on May 22, 2020  you will see the bright planet Venus about 10º above the horizon. Look just beneath it and you’ll see the tiny red dot of the planet Mercury. They will be just 0.5º apart

It’s almost like a great cosmic “It’ll be ok”, but next month, on May 16th, to be precise, a crescent moon will sit in the sky beneath Jupiter and Venus to form a smiley face amongst the stars. The scientific term for such an event is an occultation and in this case, it happens when the moon is positioned between Earth and Venus.

The timing of such an event might seem like a sign from above, but they’re not as uncommon as you might think. It was visible in 2008 from Asia and 2012 from Australia to North America. But they are easy to miss, only being visible for a short period after sunset.

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35mm film multipacks and large format stocks being discontinued by Fuji

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It almost feels like Fujifilm want to forget that part of their name includes the word “film”. They seem to be doing everything they can to kill it off in the last couple of years. Last year, they discontinued several much loved film stocks and hiked the price up on the rest. At the beginning of 2016, they increased the price again and killed off FP-100C.

Now, Fujifilm Japan announce that more film multipacks and large format stocks are to be discontinued. If my translation of Google’s translation is correct, it seems there is simply just a lack of demand.

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Now is Your Chance to Photograph All Five Visible Planets in One Shot

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Of all the planets found in the Solar System, only five of the brightest planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, can be seen with the naked eye.

While all five of these planets can be seen throughout most of the year, as of this morning they can all be seen simultaneously as they (mostly) align diagonally in the early morning sky.

Last time this happened was over a decade ago, so ready your cameras and plan your shots.

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