Friday night I went up to the River Ridge Observatory to shoot some planets. I started with Venus which is about as high in the sky after sunset as it will get in this apparition. It was disappointing so I moved on. Next up was Jupiter. I’m using a monochrome camera with RGB filters so here we have the combined result with the red, green and blue images that went into it. The color image is softer than I’d like but shows Io and it’s shadow that were transiting the disk of Jupiter this evening, They were both near the meridian of Jupiter when I started and visible on the laptop. Below are the red, green, and blue filter monochrome images that went into the image above. Notice the red spot is barely visible in the first image which is the red channel and darkest in the last image which is the blue channel.
Mercury March 14, 2018
Here is an image of Mercury taken from the River Ridge Observatory this evening. Mercury is currently popping up in the western sky for a few days as it does about four times per year before it slides right back down toward the Sun. Right now it is above and to the right of Venus but dimmer. Over the next several days it will get larger and more crescent shaped but will also get closer to the Sun making it more difficult. This was taken with my trusty 9.25″ SCT with my ASI120MM camera. A red filter was used to reduced atmosphere induced chromatic aberration. I combined the best 25% of 5000 1 millisecond images then sharpened in Photoshop.
Venus and Mercury Little Rock March 3, 2018
Today, I’ve seen and photographed all five bright planets. This morning I got up early and went to the River Ridge Observatory to image Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. As it turned out, those attempts were too noisy to show but then about 13 hours later I was able to capture a near conjunction of Venus and Mercury after sunset. The two planets are just over one degree apart. Enjoy the short video.
