Jupiter-Saturn conjunction

avolkov

Hey guys,
As my first post in the forum, I'd like to share this image of the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, as seen on the 22nd of December, 2020. Images acquired with 0.01 s exposure time each, and stacked and sharpened in Registax. The brightness of Saturn was enhanced in Photoshop.
Jupiter's moons are, from left to right, Ganymede, Io, Europa, Callisto.

Huge thank you to Lukas from Skygems Observatories for his help in making this image possible!

avolkov

Here's an annotated version

lukas_demetz

Hi Andriy,

well done, I like especially the annotated image.

For those who wonder how the hell we managed to get the data for this image: We did a few dry runs a few nights before the 21th december, and were able to sort out a few things:

The iDK can see up to about 10° above horizon when looking West
We had to keep exposures really short. Even at 0.01 secs we had Jupiter saturate the CCD
The shutter was visible up to about 0.05 secs of exposure.
Focusing by hand at that low altitude was "interesting"

That said, at the end it was pretty easy. The hardest part was to wait for suitable weather (on 21th december, clouds came in, so we resorted using a short period of clear skies on 22nd december). I have to say that I really miss being able to shoot the planets with the scope, but seeing those results we might be able to get some more data in the future using the iDK 😄

Thanks Andriy for your efforts in processing the data. Again, well done!