Saturn, Mars, and M44 Conjunction - 06/17/2006

[stuart]

My image of this event: It is a composit of 9 images taken for 15 seconds each (so 2.25 minutes). It was taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT 350D camera attached to a 500 mm f/9.9 lens on a passive clock drive mount. Shot settings were 15 second shots, repeating every 23 seconds at ISO 100. Images were taken around 9:30 PM MDT on July 17.

Processing was I aligned the images in Photoshop and cropped to a standard size, separated the RGB color channels, then fit a 2-D polynomial to each image in IDL and divide the image by the polynomial to correct for vignetting (effectively flat-fielding); then each frame of R, G, and B were added together in IDL into master color channels. The channels were re-combined in Photoshop where I re-colorized, adjusted levels and curves, and deleted some clouds that rolled through the frame and hot pixels. I duplicated the image, super-saturated the color, and blurred the image then applied that as a screen to give a color glow around the brighter stars. I shrank the images to about 27% so that I could post them here.

The processed image is complete down to about magnitude 9.5, and goes down to about 10.5 in some places. Visible in the image is Saturn (lower left) with its largest moon Titan being the tiny dot just below it, Mars (upper left), and the M44 cluster.

I'll admit, they're not the best, but I had some issues: The mount I was using wasn't tracking well, so the longest exposure I could take was 15 seconds. I was only able to photograph for about 10 minutes between the time that the sky was dark enough and the group set below a roof and then the mountains.

[Darryl]

Hi Stuart,

Its nice to see what the conjunction between Saturn, Mars, and the Beehive Cluster M44 looked like, because the clouds here were doing the same thing as they usually do lately...GETTING IN THE WAY!