Last night the skies cleared so I couldn't resist going after Jupiter and Saturn. However, the conditions were brutal -- really cold, windy, horrible seeing from low altitude, and hazy skies. I decided to try my 103 mm refractor for a little more magnification. I used lucky capture and 30s videos with 20 to 30 ms exposures to capture the planets. The problem I faced was that I couldn't get both planets in the same FOV. I tried to image the intervening sky with 8s exposures to try to get a mosaic set up, but the star images were crummy and that failed. However, the 8s image of Saturn produced an image of its moons. I also took a 1s exposure to capture Jupiter's moons. So now what to do? I decided to take the star background from the conjunction image on the 15th and do a little plate solving by spreadsheet and coordinate conversions using the RA and DEC for selected stars and the planets in each image. The portion of sky involved was small so I could treat it as basically flat; that allowed me to calculate cartesian coordinates for all of the principal objects. I put the image from the 15th into Paint and read pixel coordinates for the stars and planets, which allowed me to create a scale between cartesian coordinates and pixel coordinates. Then I was able to plot the positions for Saturn and Jupiter on the 16th onto the background from the 15th. I adjusted the sizes of Saturn and Jupiter in the images from the 16th to match the sizes in the image from the 15th and, using layer masks, plopped the new planet images onto the old background and also removed the old planet images to get a final image. The fact that this took all day says something about how far my spherical trigonometry skills have slipped! Anyway, apologizing for possible math errors, I have posted the result here. What's cool is that I easily captured Saturn's moons Rhea and Titan; Titan really looked orange and bright. I also caught Callisto and Ganymede by Jupiter.

*Thanks to Rodd Dryfoos for making me aware of errors in the first version of this description, which I have now attempted to remedy.