On Dec 21st, 2020, Saturn and Jupiter came within 0.1 degrees of each other, so close that the space between the two planets in the sky was smaller than the width of a toothpick held at arm’s length. Although they appeared close in the sky, they’re actually about 460 million miles or 730 million km apart in reality. While these conjunctions have no special astronomical significance, they are a sight to behold in the night sky.
Fortuitously, the seeing was particularly good on the night of the conjunction. This photo was taken with a new QHY5-III 178 Mono camera and a 9.25 inch Celestron SCT. For planets, the scintillation of the atmosphere heavily distorts and blurs the surface features. In order to ensure a sharp picture of these planets, we employed a technique called lucky imaging. We took thousands of images with extremely short exposures (~50fps), and selected the few “lucky” images where the atmosphere minimally distorted the planets. We then stacked these best images to obtain a final image that contained much more detail than the atmospheric seeing would usually allow. This image is NOT a composite.
