Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW (Niall MacNeill)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Hercules (Her) · Contains: Extremely wide field

Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW, Niall MacNeill

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Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW

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Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW

This image was captured on 3rd October during a visit to Sydney. It shows the recent conjunction of the near opposition Mars and the full Moon over the Long Reef Headland and out to sea. The capture took place from Collaroy Beach. This was a difficult image to process because of the huge dynamic range. As a result it was necessary to take 3 images and put them together with Photoshop.......effectively an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image.

I used my wife's Canon EOS 7D, to make use of the 18-135mm lens, as the long focal length allowed me to achieve a decent images size for the Moon. All 3 images were acquired at f/8 and ISO 1600.

The first image was a 0.5 sec exposure which brought out the beautiful yellow-orange colour of the moon with the Maria a deeper red-orange. It was clear to see the distortion created by the Earth's atmosphere near the horizon. This exposure also allowed the red colour of Mars to come through and to produce a round image. Again the distortion by the atmosphere has bloated the red planet to produce a nice effect. For the 2nd image I used a 5 sec exposure and this produced the beautiful glow around the Moon without blowing it out. Clearly since the Moon itself was over-exposed it was necessary to use masks to combine the two images in Photoshop. In both these two images the foreground was completely black, so for the 3rd image I went with a 30 sec exposure. This brought out the illumination of the Moon in the sea. I reduced the brightness of this image to an appropriate level before again combining with the result of the combination of the first two images.

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Status	Advanced failed
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Astrometry.net job	3916419
PixInsight job	E6HFA1UE48A2X0PAT2VAIPUU6KVK72WQ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

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Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW

Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW

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Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW

Mars in conjunction with the rising Moon over Long Reef Headland, Sydney, NSW

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