Beautiful Southern Arizona!
- Updated
Check out reader-submitted photos of wildlife, plants, sunsets and more in this collection that celebrates our Beautiful Southern Arizona!
Light show
Burley Packwood of Green Valley took this image at 3 a.m. May 17, 2018. It was taken from his backyard looking south. It’s a two-minute composite of 15 eight-second exposures. The bright vertical band is the Milky Way and the bright star-like objects are Mars in the upper left and Jupiter in the lower right. The bright glow in the lower left is light from Nogales.
- Burley Packwood
Just super
Burley Packwood of Green Valley took this photo fo the “super blue blood moon” early Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018, from his backyard. It’s a combination of a “supermoon” (a closer than “normal” moon by almost 20,000 miles), a “blue moon” (the second full moon in a month), and a total lunar eclipse (sometimes called a “blood moon” due to its reddish color). A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is completely covered by the Earth’s shadow. The last triple lineup like this occurred in 1982, and the next one won’t occur until 2037. At the time of Wednesday’s event, the moon was just over 223,000 miles from Earth. Totality lasted more than an hour.
- Burley Packwood
Night sky
Burley Packwood of Green Valley photographed the Geminid Meteor Shower from his backyard Dec. 13. Over a period of four hours, he took 720 images 20 seconds apart. He stacked those with meteors and came up with this image. The two stars at top center are Pollux and Castor, the Gemini twins. Orion is at lower left and the Pleiades is at lower right.
- Burley Packwood
Supermoon
Boone Owens took this shot of the supermoon on Dec. 3 just after 6 p.m., from La Posada. The supermoon is a new or full moon that coincides with the lunar orb making an especially close approach to Earth. This supermoon was 221,824 miles away. The next supermoon is Jan. 1, with another coming Jan. 31. That last one will also be a blue moon (second of two full moons in one calendar month) and will occur during a total lunar eclipse.
- Boone Owens
Asteroid passes by
Burley Packwood of Green Valley took this image Wednesday night of asteroid 2014 JO25, about 1.1 million miles away (about 4.6 times the distance from the Earth to the moon). The asteroid is the broken white line; the photo is a combination of fourteen 2.5-minute images. He centered his telescope on background stars so only the asteroid appears to be moving. The asteroid passed near — astronomically speaking — the galaxy Messier 64 in the background, also known as the “Black Eye Galaxy,” which is about 24 million light-years away. This is the closest the asteroid will come to Earth for the next 500 years. It is roughly 2000 feet in diameter and was discovered in May 2014 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey just north of Tucson.
- Burley Packwood
