So very close!

Had set my alarm for 5.45am and was already creeping out of the house by 6am, having prepared both my Nikon D5100 and Olympus E-PL7 cameras ready for the Big Event on 01 May 2022 morning. Furiously focussing and clicking away on the cameras and hoping for the best. And this was the best effort with the Olympus camera. The Nikon images were a bit of a disappointment.

I'm told by Dr Chong Hon Yew of the Penang Astronomical Club that this was technically a "Quintuplet Conjunction + Moon-Planet Transit" since I had caught an image of Venus, Jupiter and three of the latter's moons. Unfortunately, Ganymede was transiting across the face of Jupiter and could not be seen.

This image below showed how the planets had aligned above my house this morning. Apart from the Jupiter-Venus duo just above the rooftops, the two dimmer points of light roughly of equidistance apart belonged to Mars (centre) and Saturn (top). If this conjunction of the sky's two brightest planets had occurred in December, who knows but they could have been mistaken for the wandering stars that had appeared over a certain manger during biblical times. Quite a possibility!