Planetary conjunction part 2

A while back I previewed a planetary conjunction involving Mars, Saturn, and Venus that would occur during the first week of August. Over the last three days I've watched and photographed the event as it unfolded, so for anyone who hasn't seen the planets yet, here are my observations. Storm clouds threatened the view on the 5th when the three planets formed a perfect triangle, but fortunately the clouds parted long enough for some good views. All of these photos were taken within one hour of sunset.

First, here's my shot on August 3rd. Mars is a few days past its conjunction with Saturn, and Venus is in the process of moving in with the pair. I had to experiment with ASA, shutter speed, and zoom settings as well as what to put in the foreground, and settled for this photo. If I had thought about it, I would have planned ahead and taken the shots from an identical spot for the sake of uniformity, but as you can tell, I snapped the following photos from slightly different areas. The sodium vapor lamps of the parking lot I was in give the trees a sickly yellow color, but there wasn't much I could do about that since I didn't bother to do any post-processing of the photos.

Here's the view on August 4th.

And then on August 5th. The geometry of the three planets is amazing.

Now here's the current orientation (though not to scale) of the planets that gives us this spectacle. Of course in the real world, Jupiter's orbit is between those of Mars and Saturn, but I omitted it and only included the three planets that we are talking about. As you can see, the four planets (when we include Earth) form nearly a straight line, so when we look in their direction, the three make a tight group in our sky. The slight differences in the planets' inclinations of their orbits (or tilt with respect to each other) make us see them in a triangle rather than a straight line.

As the days go by, Saturn will be the first to leave the group as it sinks closer toward the sun. Mars and Venus will continue to creep toward each other and be closest together on August 16th. After that, it'll be a relatively short time before the sun joins in and hides them all from view.