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A photo of Venus and Jupiter close together in tonight's sky, and a close-up that appears to have very blurry images of Jupiter's moons.

Dark blue sky, blurry bushes off to the right. In the middle of the sky are two bright spots right next to each other, the right one noticeably brighter.

With rainstorms for the first half of the week, I figured the sky would be clouded over, and I completely forgot about the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter tonight.

Despite wind, rain and even hail today, it cleared up this afternoon. I happened to run out for groceries and looked up from the parking lot to see a blue sky with Venus and Jupiter right next to each other!

I snapped a quick shot with my phone. And then got out the good camera and tripod when I got home.

And…I think I may have caught some of Jupiter’s moons?!?

Closeup: two white circles against a dark blue background. The one on the right is bigger and has diffraction rays radiating from it. The one on the left doesn't, but there are two faint, blurry dots above it aligned with the disc.

The brighter planet to the right is Venus. The almost-as-bright one to the left is Jupiter. Venus shows diffraction rays, but Jupiter doesn’t…but those dots lined up on one side of it? They’re in the right location to be Callisto, Ganymede and (possibly) Io!

I’ve got to remember to use the telephoto after getting the wide shot the next time I’m taking night sky photos with planets. Just in case.

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Not that I’ve been particularly active on Twitter for quite a while now, but the way things have gotten, especially under its new owner, I decided it was finally time to go. I haven’t deleted my main account (yet), but I’ve deleted most of my tweet history, and the accounts I used for side projects, and I don’t plan on returning.

Mastodon has filled Twitter’s niche for me over the last few years (obviously different people have different use cases, so it may not fit yours), and you can still find me there at @KelsonV@Wandering.shop.

As for the archive, I’m slowly going through and looking for threads (and occasional single posts) that I think are worth keeping, importing them where they seem to fit best on this website, whether on the blog or another section.

It may be time to do the same with Facebook and Instagram* too. I haven’t been active on either of them in ages, and I’d rather own my data IndieWeb style than wait for Meta to go the way of LiveJournal.

*I’ve already trimmed a lot of my Instagram history.

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Interesting point at The Intercept: Don’t trust cropping tools for security.

If you crop an image for security reasons, make sure you know whether the tool you’re using crops the data (like most image editors) or just the displayed image (like embedding an image into a PDF/Word doc/etc.) If it’s only cropping the display, people can still get at the full image!

Also, make sure the EXIF doesn’t include a thumbnail of the original!

My advice: if opsec is an issue,

  1. Use an actual image editor.
  2. Save the file without any metadata.

(via Schneier on Security)

Update: Interesting that this article came out just before news of some actually broken tools for Android and Windows that do save over the data…but don’t properly truncate the file, so if the interesting bits happen to have been in the extra space left over, they can still be recovered!