Jupiter Racing Saturn, Me Racing Clouds (Steve Lantz)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Jupiter Racing Saturn, Me Racing Clouds

During the afternoon, the clouds cleared off and I started celebrating the conjunction image I would get! Karma-wise, that cost me because when I went to set up the scope as it started to get dark, the clouds were moving back in! It became a race for getting an image before getting clouded out. I got the scope (103 mm William Optics refractor) on target with the deep sky camera only to have nothing but cloud. But I hung in hoping for some thinning. I got partially lucky and saw Jupiter and Saturn show up on the computer screen. I shot through the clouds with exposures as short as 0.2s and as long as 16s as fast as I could until the clouds took over. The long images just got clouds and washed out planets; but the short and the intermediate images captured Jupiter's Galilean moons and the disks of the planets, although planetary details were washed out. I first compiled a cloudy image with the moons and the planetary disks, masking in different exposure lengths for these features. Then, I used a trick that Niall MacNeill and I played around with awhile back, namely, removing blue sky from twilight exposures, only this time is was removing clouds! On a copy of the cloudy image, I pasted cloud over the scope pic and planets, blurred the heck out of that, and subtracted this image from the original plus a little tinkering to get the final. If it weren't for the magnitude of the occasion, this would be pretty lame. But getting any part of such a significant celestial event is quite special!

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Description: Image after subtracting clouds plus a bit of detailing ...

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Jupiter Racing Saturn, Me Racing Clouds

Jupiter Racing Saturn, Me Racing Clouds

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