The Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn
Imaged with a FujiFilm X-T2 and a 55-200m zoom lens (set to 200mm). Camera mounted on a Skywatcher Star Adventurer to prevent smearing of the image due to 7 second exposures at that focal length. Imaged at F4 and ISO 800.
This set of pictures was taken almost one day before the planets' closest approach and were taken on 20 December 2020 at 17:20. The closest approach itself was on the 21st December at 18:00 but that day was clouded out with very heavy rain where I live (as usual, most astronomy special events are clouded out in the UK - typical!).
Jupiter and Saturn were around 32 arcminutes apart when this picture was taken, moving to their closest at around 30 arcminutes at their closest the following day. 30 arcminutes is about the same diameter of The Sun and The Moon.
The Moon, 7 January 2021
I had to get up early in the morning to get this picture of The Moon. I set my alarm and got up at 05:00 which took considerable motivation, especially since it was -6C! I don't capture many last quarter and later moon pictures because the Moon is only ever visible in that phase early in the morning and working full time it is not easy to be getting up very early when you have to do lots of driving. However, conditions for astronomy in the UK have been exceptionally poor for the last six months of 2020 and I am desperate to be able to image anything at all!
Technical Details
The Moon was in Scorpio, low down to The South from my location, and seeing was average with the Moon at such a low altitude Phase is 38% waning.
Imaged from my back garden with my TEC 140 refractor and ASI174M camera with LRGB filters. I captured 10000 frames in each of R,G and B and 25000 in luminance. The .SER files were quite jumpy with The Moon being at quite a low altitude and so I used about 50% of the frames from each recording. I captured with Sharpcap and then processed with Autostakkert, PixInsight and Photoshop.
I hope you like it!
The Moon, 30 Dec 2020
The Moon at a 99% waning phase 30 Dec 2020 between 21:30 and 22:20. Note the bluish and tan colours of the mare (seas).
Technical Details
Imaged from my back garden in Nottingham, UK. The Moon was high up in the constellation of Cancer and seeing was very good - unusual in the UK. TEC140 refractor and ASI174M camera.
The image scale is such that I had to capture two runs with each filter to capture the North and The South parts of The Moon and then stitch the two together in Photoshop using the Merge tool. I used LRGB filters and captured 10000 frames in RGB and 20000 in luminance. Data set was in excess of 500 Gigabytes! I then used Autostakkert, Photoshop and PixInsight to process. Capture software in Sharpcap.