three vid stacks, two planet shots… and a partridge in a pear tree.
Managed to capture the Saturn / Jupiter great conjunction on Monday, with photos and video for Jupiter, Saturn, the Galilean moons, and two of Saturn’s moons, in order of increasing apparent magnitude (brighter to dimmer). Single-image framing shot at the beginning of the session to make sure everything looked lined up well catches Jupiter as a bright white spot, Saturn with a little detail, and three of the 4 Galilean moons (Ganymede was hanging out in front of Jupiter and therefore wasn’t visible) just barely visible:
Had to expose videos differently for the features on Jupiter, the best resolution I could grab for Saturn, and for the best spot size of Jove’s moons. Then I shot 10x 2-second exposures which show the planets as blown-out bright spots, just to try and see what else I could grab. After stacking and size matching to the video shots, I managed to pull Titan and Rhea out of the noise, which was a first. All together, the processed shot ended up like this:
Blew the photo up and added some labels to end up with this:
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