Saturn and Mars Together

Here is another quick lunchtime blog entry, to show the results of last night's shooting. Saturn and Mars had their closest conjunction for the next 14 years: only 0.25 degrees apart in the sky. (That's close enough to fit behind the tip of your little finger held at arm's length.)

First of all, here is how the images turned out separately (magnified in a photo editor); you can clearly see Saturn's rings, and can almost see some surface coloration on Mars' disk. Of course, much better amateur telescopic images of these planets exist -- but I'm impressed at what can be done with a simple telephoto lens!





Here they are together; click on the image to see a bigger view.



In order to show you any detail at all, I had to crop fairly tightly. (Click here for the original full-frame image.) The astonishing thing is that you can see Saturn's rings in the same shot with Mars.

Perhaps more incredible to me was what I saw by looking through my small Celestron telescope; I could see Saturn and Mars at the same time, without moving the telescope. That's something that doesn't happen every day! (Or year, or decade in this case!)

I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that someday I'd like to mate the camera with a telescope. Unfortunately, "someday" could be a long time in the future (probably never), since that would require one or two orders of magnitude higher time and resource commitment.

In the meantime, I'm thoroughly enjoying Casual Astrophotography.