Pictures on December 15th
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 12/15/2020, 11:02 pm
Look toward the southwest after sunset. Sunset was at 5:38pm in Tampa and I took the first two pictures below at 6:16pm. I took pictures for half an hour and it was still above the horizon, I just wanted to come inside to see how they came out. (and too many bugs)

First picture had no zoom. Saturn is upper left. Jupiter, and it's moons, are lower right. All would be within that red circle in the first image, though Saturn was a little too faint.



Zoomed in some. Saturn is the smaller dot.



I started adjusting my camera's manual settings after those pictures. It wasn't as dark as it seemed in some of the pictures I took.

These were all taken on a tripod. It isn't very good. I set the camera's timer each time to take a picture in 10 seconds, when hopefully the camera would steady itself enough after pressing the button to take a picture. Then it would do whatever I set the exposure to.

The rest of the pictures are between 50x optical zoom to 200x digital zoom. Most are probably 50x to 100x. After you get past 50x optical, the digital zoom pixelates it. I think I only went past 100x when I tried video, which didn't come out too great. When you are zoomed in so far, you can see the motion of the planets and stars in video. (but the video quality is poor) You can also tell with a long exposure that they are moving. I kept playing around with the settings. All the long exposures, beyond 1 second, were too blurred and I didn't include those.

I don't know why the first two Saturn images came out different colors. It seemed like I had the same settings.



Too much light for the 1 second exposure images of Saturn. You can't see the space between planets and rings then.

Big dot is Jupiter. How big it really is I don't know. I never did take a short exposure of Jupiter like I did Saturn. It might be around that big or maybe it's just because of an exposure time that is too long. There is a line of moons, a straight line pretty much. Two to upper left and two to bottom right. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter)



Circling what seem to be the moons.



A GIF image that rotates between three pictures. There were other objects that appeared at times in my pictures. I guess some other satellites or other stuff in orbit perhaps. It didn't seem like stars that sometimes the camera picked up on sometimes, and at other times didn't, since the planets still looked about the same.



They will get closer and closer each night. I'll have to keep practicing to try to get some good pictures when they are close together.
30
In this thread:
Closest conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, in hundreds of years, on December 21st - Chris in Tampa, 12/15/2020, 1:39 am
< Return to the front page of the: message board | monthly archive this page is in
Post A Reply
This thread has been archived and can no longer receive replies.