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Three Planets - 28 Apr. 2012


Venus, Mars, Saturn

With the first quarter moon lighting up the sky, I used this evening to resurrect and tune up my old Celestron CG-11 setup on three planets - Venus, Mars, and Saturn, all shown at the same image scale. These images are not as sharp as you might find elsewhere on the internet. These days the preferred technique is to use a video camera and specialized software to sift through thousands of images which can be captured in seconds, but my digital camera (Nikon D70s) was more convenient. I manually snapped about a dozen shots of each planet to get these results, which I think pretty closely match the visual appearance through the eyepiece.

To capture these shots, these special procedures were used:

All shots were taken using positive projection (9mm Orthoscopic eyepiece) on a Celestron C11 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. Post-processing was done in Photoshop and Lightroom.