Though clear, the moon phase kept me from imaging deep sky last night. I woke up early to catch this conjunction ! I was unsure exactly where it would rise through the trees, and was hoping I could get some video capture before sunrise. I was dead wrong and set up early for no reason. Turns out this didn't clear my tree line until it was at almost 25 degrees of altitude and almost a full half hour after sunrise!

What you see here was captured with a single RGB video set in broad daylight at 1200UTC (8am EST) on the morning of 05-OCT-2017. Venus and Mars had a separation of just over 14 arcminutes so they fit well within the frame of my ASI1600MM on the EdgeHD 8". Though this was an actual capture of the conjunction I cheated a little here. Because Venus has a visual magnitude of -3.9 and Mars a +1.8, I was forced into a little masked stretching of the Mars data to pull it into visibility. This is not a composite but selectively "enhanced" to make an image.

Amazingly, Mars is only 3.7 arcseconds in diameter now and over 2.5AU away. It was so tiny that it only spanned a width of 7 pixels on my camera. I utilized AS!3 to drizzle stack the data at 3x and that is what is presented here. I don't know if my eyes are deceiving me, but the markings on Mars look correct and even show a hint of the northern polar ice cap.

Venus looks like it's typical featureless self in RGB but it is apparent that it is in partial phase. In fact, it is 92% illuminated. Venus comes in at a size of only 11 arcseconds and a distance of 1.5AU.

Light travel time from Mars is over 21 minutes (almost 9 minutes longer than from Venus). This is about as distant a Mars as I would ever dare attempt. I'm actually amazed it all came together.

I think you'll probably need to look at the full size to even come close to seeing this for what it is

....link

Taking tiny targets to a whole new level.

Enjoy!