The Great Conjunction ... T Plus One Day 12/22/2020

[Hankmeister3]

Tonight was very kind with low to moderate breeze (8 to 10 mph) and I was able to find some shelter next to a storage barn near my Fairmount site. Pickering 3 skies, average transparency and relatively low humidity. Atmospherics near the horizon were still an issue and caused a lot of chromatic fringing around the planets even with the relatively clean optical pathway of the Meade 10-inch f/10 SCT. There were several nice single-frames but I'm posting a ten frame stack that defined Saturn just a bit more and presented Jupiter's bands better given the soupy conditions about 15 degrees above the horizon.

This particular string was shot over a period of about three minutes starting at 6:11 PM CST. The exposures of the donor frames were 1/15 second at ISO 100. Using Autostakkert 2.6.8 I let it chose the best 10 frames of the original 20 I had in the string and this is the result. I added four layers in my processing regimen and also isolated Jupiter, then Saturn and then Jupiter's four moons for individual processing which included luminance, contrast, tone, saturation (I had to de-saturate Saturn), despeckling and a bit of Gaussian blur to add a little smoothness to obscure a bit of pixelation since this final image is a 3X crop to enlarge the planetary bodies for easier viewing.

I also decided at the last minute I'd rather use the extra light at prime focus of the 10inch f/10 SCT to cut down on my exposure time in hopes of catching some "lucky shots" to mitigate atmospherics and the slight wind gusts. I was also concerned that using a 2X 3-element Orion barlow or a 12mm orthoscopic eyepiece projection would only enhance the color fringing of the two planets since they were relatively close to the horizon even at the beginning of the imaging session.

I did my best to clean up the chromatic artifacts but there's only so much I can do with my Arcsoft PhotoStudio 6.0 image processing suite.

[Hankmeister3]

I rotated and enlarged the image so you can get a better look at this photo. BTW, what happened to the zoom feature here at TSS? Is there a trick to zooming the slightly enlarged image you get when you click on the original photo?

[Graeme1858]

That's a great conjunction image Henry.

There was a constraint put on image size because the forum total storage was starting to stack up. If you use an internet link instead of an attachment you can use the bbcode fimg to determine your image dimensions.

Regards

Graeme

[Greenman]

Super work Henry nice clean image that’s even more impressive with the enlargement.

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks for you comment and heads-up, Graeme.