Venus and Jupiter - Conjunction 30 April UT (LacailleOz)

Venus and Jupiter - Conjunction 30 April UT

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

When I imaged the Grand Conjunction of 2020 between Jupiter and Saturn, I had some technical difficulties, but at least it was possible to capture and extract both planets and their moons from the same video. In the case of Venus and Jupiter, the disparity in brightness is such that this proved impossible: either Venus is hopelessly over exposed, or Jupiter is completely invisible. So this image is the result of two videos stacked and then collated as layers which could each be appropriately procesSed for the target. The videos were very widefield, using the ZWO485MC and its 3840*2160 resolution, to capture both planets in the one field, but this meant the frame rate was extremely low at 11 fps.

So, just to re-emphasise, this is a composite with two images superimposed as layers, each exposing one or other planet correctly, though both images were stacks from videos of the whole conjunction. I also created a layer from the Jupiter image that brightened the moons to the pOint of visibility.

To get these wide field videos to stack, I found I needed to run them through PIPP first to stabilize the image (noting that I was using my old 8SE with Alt-Az mount, so the tracking was good, but not perfect). Without this step, I kept getting very strange results in AS3, or I completely crashed the softtware. The files are enormous, around 15 Gb, as I was using the whole of the sensor. I saved 10% of frames in PIPP, leaving me with but a few hundred frames to stack in AS3. I then had a Jupiter tif with an overexposed Venus, and a Venus tif with an underexposed (indeed invisible) Jupiter. I layered these in GIMP, also creating a layer from the Jupiter tif for the moons. Note that, although consisting of just a few dozen stacked frames, the image of Jupiter shows Ganymede as a dot transiting the surface, and Venus is at near half phase.

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