The winter solstice conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn has been in the news for months. I have been telling people not to expect the "show" they keep hearing about. It was not really very bright and certainly wasn't a brilliant "Christmas Star" that was often promoted online. To the naked eye, you could barely see that Saturn was even there. While it was interesting that the two planets appeared so close together - other than that, it was just another over hyped dud of a celestial event (visually speaking). But I bet they sold a lot of telescopes this year. Video shot with a Canon Eos Rebel T3i mounted to a Meade LX90 telescope. Jupiter is pretty blown out exposure-wise in order to see some of its moons - and to be able to make out Saturn and its rings. Saturn and Jupiter are roughly the same size but Saturn is about 400 million miles further away and less than half the brightness of Jupiter. (It should be noted that I got sucked in to buying this telescope back in 2003 when the Mars being closest to the earth hype was all over the news.)
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4 comments:
Thank you for posting this. I live in a city. I've never seen this kind of celestial event - Jupiter & moons! Saturn's rings. We can't even see the Milky Way here. Merry Christmas.
I would have thought you would have had a much better view from your location. We didn't see anything from here due to clouds.
Great photography John (as always) Thanks for posting this!
Here I was imagining how lucky the people of Brewster County were to be able to see this event and wishing I could be there. In my area, you could not see it due to the clouds.
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