A morning string of planets (Niall MacNeill)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Pisces (Psc) · Contains: Extremely wide field

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A morning string of planets

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A morning string of planets

Yesterday morning's string of planets above my observatory. The four planets readily visible are from top to bottom, Saturn, Mars, Venus & Jupiter. Also just above Jupiter as a very faint bluish dot is Neptune, which I enhanced somewhat. Of course they lie along the ecliptic which is where the plane of the Solar System intersects the Earth. For you who are based in the Northern Hemisphere, note that the ecliptic runs to the North for us and so, when facing East as I was here, it goes up to the left. If you are north of the tropic of Capricorn it would certainly be going the other way for you.

Quite a stunning sight to see at 4:30am :-D.

I took a series of 10 x 20 sec exposures at ISO 3200 f/5.6 and these were calibrated and integrated in PixInsight to give a much smoother background, although eliminating the stars and planets in the process. I then used maximise feature in Photoshop to bring in the stars and planets from the best single image. I also rectified the slight elongation by creating a duplicate layer and moving the position of the bottom image in the direction of the elongation, until there was a nice overlap. Combining the layers and using the minimise function eliminated the elongation.

As you can see I did have the observatory open in an attempt to image Saturn, but the seeing was atrocious, with a band of cloud coming in. Nevertheless, it is nice to have this memento.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Advanced failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5695805
PixInsight job	NWXMZ559LVJV2F0XLULO4O0L4GH1S5GB
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

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A morning string of planets

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A morning string of planets

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