It is a bit of a miracle that this image even exists. The weeks leading up to the conjunction were cloudy and rainy and I had no chance to practice or plan in advance. The actual event on the 21st we missed due to weather luckily there was a small clearing in our area on the 22nd however I had very little prep. Without being able to actually see the planets the nights before to know exactly where they would appear un obstructed I had to take a best guess on where to setup and what gear to setup. I chose a location that I knew had a deep cut in the trees where I had observed Jupiter and Saturn earlier in the year, I setup a few hours in advance watching clear skies turn cloudy grey and hoping that it would re-clear in time. The setup I chose turned out to not be optimal. That night I setup the EdgeHD 11' with the 6200MC. I needed the large frame to pair with the Edge and I thought I could use an ROI to improve the frame rate above the default 2 FPS but in practice I didn't have the time and so much went wrong. First it turned out to be cloudy most of the time Jupiter and Saturn were visible, second they were appearing between two trees and that also limited the time, given the early setting time there was no way I could move the setup after the window. I was lucky that I was able to spot them when there was a cloud break but Jupiter was almost in the trees but got Jupiter and Saturn in frame and captured the full frame with SharpCap. Seeing them both in frame that first time was awesome and one of the best moments of this entire experience, just knowing that I had at least seen the event live myself made everything worth it. Within 5 minutes Jupiter was in the tree and there was no time left. The rest of the night I gave up on imaging and just enjoyed the moment using the Evo 9.25 with an eye piece and moved that around to look at the conjunction which was really nice to be able to do as it would move every 4 minutes or so behind something. I ended up with one video that showed Jupiter it's moons and Saturn but Jupiter was heavily over exposed. This video would be the main base of the image. My initial attempts to stack the whole image failed, what ended up working was using the surface mode in AS3!. Just a lot of trial and error. I had a decent base image then but Jupiter was just a white circle. I honestly thought at the time that was the best I would be able to do with this data. The next night I tried setting up at another location closer to our home but it turns out that I was mistaken that I could see Jupiter or Saturn from that location and the night was a waste. I tried the next night back at my original location but the weather just didn't cooperate. I realized if I was going to get any improvement it would have to be from my original data sets. I searched through the videos and low and behold I found a few frames where the clouds came in just enough to dim Jupiter and show some banding. Frame 64 being the best! After a bunch of transformation such as debayering the frames properly (thank you PI, Usually I use FireCapture and save to SER but this time SharpCap and AVI as that was the default and I had limited time) I manually cropped out 21 frames of Jupiter that showed some banding and color. I used PIPP to create a video, then a number of attempts with AS3! to get a stacked out put to tweak in Registax. I had an image of Jupiter with some banding that was a lot better than just a white circle and I was very happy. I did some more work in the GIMP to tweak the color balance, and did some comparisons between various stacks and single frames before settling on an image for Jupiter. Next I had to repeat the process for Saturn though, this time I used the original 34 frames I had used for my base image but cropped out Saturn manually, made a video stacked it, etc. Everything was combined using the GIMP. I had to cut out the planets from the background to adjust it back to look black instead of cloudy, recompose everything. All in all this took me around a month on and off to reach a final image. While I know there are better images out there I feel fortunate to have been able to observe the conjunction first hand with my own eyes and gear and the fact that the clouds gave me some Jupiter frames with just enough dimming to do something I feel VERY lucky. If I was to do this again I would use the FLT132 with Reducer and ASI462MC or ASI290MM with filters.

Hope that folks enjoy the image and the story and know that if you just keep digging and don't give up sometimes you really can make lemonade from the lemons. Thanks for reading (wow you read this whole write up!) and looking! Brad