One night, 2 camera bodies, widest angle to longest telephoto.

BF Hammer

Senior Member
Weather was perfect this past 11th of August, which was the peak night for the Perseid meteor shower. I also decided to target Jupiter and Saturn the same night.

On a tripod pointed north: D750 + Sigma 20mm f/1.4 with the intervalometer set to take a 15 second exposure every 20 seconds. I was hoping to capture enough meteors to make a composite of meteors radiating from a common point.

On a SkyWatcher AZ-GTi goto mount with EQ mode modifications: D7000 + Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 C. I aimed with the phone app. Planets very bright this night and I only needed ISO 200, f/8, and fairly fast shutter speeds. Jupiter was shot as little as 1/40 second, Saturn was done about 1 second. Adjusted to longer exposure times to capture moons also. Using a plug-in external intervalometer 35 exposures would be taken at a time before changing settings or aiming different.

I'll start with Jupiter. I basically had a group of photos showing the planet alone, and another group showing a very over-exposed planet and some moons. I processed each group separately with common settings for each group in RawTherapee, exported each group as .PNG. I then reviewed the exports and threw-out the junk exposures, and used RegiStax to stack the good ones. Now with 2 .TIF files to work with, I cut the image of the planet to paste over the over-exposed planet image so we get the final product: planet with moons. Really only minor adjustments were required to bring out some detail of Jupiter and make the curves of Saturn look uniform. I used Stellarium as a reference to label the moons.

RUoSRxE.jpg

sZcu8Px.jpg

6JTVCEx.jpg

skfUjUx.jpg

As for the meteor shower, it was a weeknight way past my bedtime. For 1 hour 10 minutes I made 143 exposures and captured 2 verified meteors. I think about 4 or 5 satellites in that time too.

Single exposure images of the meteors. First has the foreground illuminated by a car's headlights driving by, 2nd photo has a satellite track to the right of the meteor.

ylBdxup.jpg

Kyecu4M.jpg

But I have Sequator, let's have some fun with the folder of images. Using the 2 meteor images, a foreground-illuminated image, and a stars-n-dark-foreground image to stack for this.

AFZD2Gh.jpg

All 143 stacked and foreground stabilized. The north end of the Milky Way is barely visible on the right side of the image.

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Star trails mode

FyTksGP.jpg

So I did not get the photo I set out for that night, but I had enough sugar to make lemonade out of 140 or so lemons.
 

BF Hammer

Senior Member
Thanks Hobbit. I wish I had the luxury to skip work the next day so I could stay out to 3am. I would have taken some shots of Mars also.
 
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