Conversation

much excite... first shot of Jupiter and Saturn together as they near conjunction on the 22nd.... I hope Tuesday is clear seeing. This looks *much* better in the telescope. Gonna take enough shots to attempt stacking over the next few days.
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It's an astronomically meaningless event, but aesthetically an amazing one. When you can see 2 planets in one view...
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closer and closer... tomorrow is the big day. Seeing slightly worse today. About 1/15s at ISO 1600 seems to produce the best single frame results. Looking live, you can now see the 4 moons of Jupiter and Saturn's Titan lined up so it looks like all 5 belong to Jupiter.
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Here’s the best shot I was able to take of the moons. There’s 5 visible (4 Jovian + Titan) but they seem to be coincidentally lined up in a straight line so you can’t actually tell which one is Titan. Very faint in this photo but very clear in the scope.
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Composite of approach so far. They’ve gone from ~50-60’ to ~8-9’ over 3 nights. I’ve sketched what they should look like tomorrow, at ~6.1’ closest Jupiter is currently ~49” (60” = 1’ = 1 arc-minute... the moon is about 30’ or 0.5 degrees, so conjunction is 1/5 diameter of moon.
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...And here we go, photo of the conjunction day. It's a few hours past (happened at ~1 PM US time I think) but still, damn close.
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