BF Hammer
Senior Member
If you have a star tracker, it will be much easier, and perhaps a telescope is needed.
Saturn and Jupiter will converge in the sky, and be at their closest to each other on the 21st. In North America, Jupiter and Saturn are in the southwest sky right after sunset and setting an hour or so later.
How close will they be? To bare eyes they will look like a single light, I'm sure. In Stellarium, it appears this photo might be possible.
If you use a 600mm lens on a full-frame 24MP body, and you crop in down to 1:1 pixel-level, that would be the photo. Teleconverter or an actual telescope would improve things. Photos a couple of days before or after also possible, it would be harder to crop in and have both planets and all moons in frame.
Speaking of which, my experience with taking photos of these planets separately is that you must over-expose the planet by a lot to see the moons. And Jupiter is much brighter than Saturn, so details will be blown-out on Jupiter if you expose for Saturn. My plan will be to take 3 series of photos exposing for each element. Then after using stacking software to combine the data and clean up the noise and increase apparent resolution, I would use the moons as the base photo, paste a properly exposed Jupiter and Saturn over the blown-out versions on the base.
Saturn and Jupiter will converge in the sky, and be at their closest to each other on the 21st. In North America, Jupiter and Saturn are in the southwest sky right after sunset and setting an hour or so later.
How close will they be? To bare eyes they will look like a single light, I'm sure. In Stellarium, it appears this photo might be possible.
If you use a 600mm lens on a full-frame 24MP body, and you crop in down to 1:1 pixel-level, that would be the photo. Teleconverter or an actual telescope would improve things. Photos a couple of days before or after also possible, it would be harder to crop in and have both planets and all moons in frame.
Speaking of which, my experience with taking photos of these planets separately is that you must over-expose the planet by a lot to see the moons. And Jupiter is much brighter than Saturn, so details will be blown-out on Jupiter if you expose for Saturn. My plan will be to take 3 series of photos exposing for each element. Then after using stacking software to combine the data and clean up the noise and increase apparent resolution, I would use the moons as the base photo, paste a properly exposed Jupiter and Saturn over the blown-out versions on the base.