I present a short video, narrated by me “live” at the telescope, of the December 2020 “Great Conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn.
The main visual content is real-time 4K video of the planets shot through a telescope on December 22, supplemented by still images shot through the telescope that night, plus other wide scenes shots with 35mm and 85mm lenses.
I shot all images from home or near home in southern Alberta, at my northerly latitude of 51° N, placing the planets rather low in the southwest twilight.
A snowstorm on December 21 (of course!) prevented me from shooting or seeing anything on the evening of the planets’ mutual closest approach. But when I shot this video on the night after, the planets were just 10 arc minutes apart - still rare and very impressive, and only 4 arc minutes farther apart than the evening before.
I hope you enjoy the vicarious view and explanation!
TECHNICAL:
The telescope I used is shown in the selfie still image at the end - a Celestron SE6 optical tube (150mm aperture at f/10 for 1,500mm focal length) on a Sky-Watcher EQM-35 equatorial mount. I chose this combination as a compact portable rig, yet with enough focal length to frame the two planets well, as they were so close it took quite a bit of focal length.
And the EQM-35 mount, while GoTo, could be roughly polar aligned and set to track the sky without needing to be “GoTo” aligned on stars, as that was difficult to do in the bright twilight.
I shot the video with a Canon EOS Ra in its 4K mode, which crops the frame in by 1.6x, which in this case was a benefit. I set the camera on Manual and varied the ISO speed to boost image brightness, going as high as 12,800 I think.
However, the seeing was poor enough that even at a very slow ISO setting for a dimmer image there was no detail visible on the disk of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn were still very blurry! So it was best to expose for the moons as the main feature of note. Titan shows up!
The narration audio comes from the camera’s built-in mic.
For more still images of this and other conjunctions, see my gallery at www.flickr.com...
Music by Adi Goldstein / AGSoundtrax.com
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