Jupiter & Saturn Conjunction

David_S85

Just got done editing an image of Jupiter plus it's moons and Saturn. My fingers almost froze solid from being out an hour and a half.

On December 22, 2020, the clouds finally parted enough for a view of the great planetary conjunction. The day before the pair would have appeared even closer together. In reality, Jupiter and Saturn were 600 million miles apart.

The Jovian moons (top to bottom) of Europa, Calisto, Io and Ganymede are visible. Saturn's moons were too dim and too small to resolve properly with my equipment.

Canon 5D3 DSLR with Canon 400mm L 5.6 plus a Canon 1.4x TC were used to get this image. 1/15 sec., F8.0 at ISO 2000.

PLEASE post yours in this thread if you have one. Would love to see what you all got of this rare event.

black mamba

Many thanks, David, for posting this. Some darn sea fog rolled into my area.....couldn't see a thing.

moose135

Very nice work, David! We were out on Monday night, lakeside of a local park, and the wind was howling! I'm shooting the same gear as you - 5D3, 100-400 with the 1.4TC, and it was just a huge sail in that wind. Last night, we got some shots from my backyard, the wind had died down and we had a short window of time to shoot before they disappeared behind the treeline.

This was Monday night with a wider lens.

kdog

Good job both of you.

David, this photo of mine is taken with a 7DMKII, 500mm F/4 + TC 1.4X for an effective focal length of 1120mm.
You mention you used a 5DMKIII, 400mm, and TC1.4 which gives you 560mm. That's coincidentally half the resolution of my setup.
And yet both of our photos are almost the same size. How can that be? (where's that scratching head emoji...)

David_S85

Thanks, Joel. Hey, you got 6 moons (of the 79)! Not bad! I really really tried to resolve some features on Jupiter with shorter exposures, but they were all blown out. In 2080 I'll remember to dial that in a little better.

(where's that scratching head emoji...)

This one?

As for the size of the final crop I did a few things there. I had one nice CR2 file that I could make 3 different exposures for -- one for the moons, one for Jupiter and another for Saturn. Cropped it to 806 x 537. Once the composite of the three files were done, I 2x upsized the final to 1612 x 1074 so it wouldn't look stupid small. Maybe that was a cheat, but I was going for presentation.

El Gato

David et al. very nice images!

View the event, visually on the 21st. Thanks to you all for showing us the "close up" view...certainly an image for the ages.

kdog

@David_S85 Yes, that one, thanks.

You must have a good technique. Mine comes out all pixelated when I upsize it.

David_S85

@kdog said:
You must have a good technique. Mine comes out all pixelated when I upsize it.

Use bicubic resize. Perhaps PS doesn't describe it that way anymore. I'm using a 15 year old copy of Pain Shop Pro.