Great Conjunction of Jupiter & Saturn (12/14 - Getting Ready) (JDJ)

Great Conjunction of Jupiter & Saturn (12/14 - Getting Ready)

Imaged Jupiter and Saturn on the evening of December 14, 2020. Getting ready for the great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn only one week from now on December 21, 2020. Shot under poor transparency and seeing conditions. Io is the Jovian moon visible between Jupiter and Saturn. On the opposite side of Jupiter are Ganymede (too close to over-exposed Jupiter to be resolved), Europa, and Callisto (too close together to be separately resolved in this image).

I've been trying different imaging setups and while Jupiter and Saturn remain on the order of a degree apart I've settled on the C8 and full frame DSLR as the best combination I have to get decent resolution and the wide field I need during the week before closest approach. Tonight was my first time I was able to get both Jupiter and Saturn in the same frame with this setup. Current separation is on the order of 0.85 degrees. I pulled the image into Winjupos and I'm getting about 0.5 arcsex/pixel (about 70 pixels across Jupiter) with the SCT at F10 (2000 mm FL) and the D750 sensor. A few days out from closest approach I should be able to add a 2x barlow and still get both objects in the field of view. I'd love to use my ZWO ASI224MC or 290MM to image the event, but at F10 I can only get 9 arcmin across the sensor of the 290MM and minimum separation on 12/21 is about 6 arcmin. So, weather permitting day of I will give that a shot, but my baseline plan is the D750 where I have a wide enough field of view to track progress during the week before/after the event (fingers crossed, weather permitting!).

Imaged with a Celestron 8" SCT at F10 and Nikon D750 with an exposure of 1/10 sec at ISO12800.

Final
Original
B
C
D

B

Description: Zoomed in (3x) crop on Jupiter

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C

Description: Zoomed in (3x) crop on Saturn

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D

Description: WJ image measurements on Jupiter to determine image scale

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Cloudy Nights
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
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Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn (2020)
Jupiter
Saturn

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