Anonymous
Edhat readers share their photos of the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter on Monday evening.
By Fritz Olenberger
[Above] are my photos of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I took it from the Hope Ranch area.
You can see the rings of Saturn, and one of the moons of Jupiter (at 11:00 from the planet).
By Ron Williams
You’re probably getting lots of these and many are no doubt much better, but here’s one from yesterday (horizontal) and one from today (vertical). If you look closely you can see that Saturn has moved relative to Jupiter, but it’s hard to tell how much closer they are today on the official conjunction date. Only those with exceptional vision can separate the two without binoculars.
By Patti Gutshall
Taken with a Nikon 850 and 1500mm lens. I was surprised to see Jupiter’s moons.
By an edhat reader
My contribution to the conjunction photos – it was a great night! You can just make out some of Jupiter’s cloud belts.
By Chuck Macpuzl
Here are some views of the Great Conjunction from Sunday and Monday evening, showing how the configuration of the planets and their moons changed. They were taken with a DSLR looking through a 130mm refractor telescope, with a 2x Barlow lens added.
I can’t hope to match the quality of the images Edhat has already posted. I was shooting over warm pavement and a neighbor’s slate roof, so air currents caused a lot of distortion, especially in the Sunday evening images. That’s my excuse, anyway. I also didn’t have the dynamic range to capture both the planets and the moons without blowing out the planets, so these are composite images. They are also flipped relative to other images because I had a diagonal mirror in my light path.
Here’s the configuration on Sunday evening, showing all four of Jupiter’s Galilean moons, plus Saturn’s biggest moon Titan. The background star HD 191250 was masquerading as a fifth Jupiter moon. It was actually occulted by Ganymede a little bit later, and later still by Jupiter, since it coincidentally was on Jupiter’s orbital path.
The gas giants were apparently closest at about 6 AM PST on Monday, so they weren’t above our horizon. They had only moved a couple of arcseconds apart by sunset for us, but it was enough that they were visibly separated by a small amount. This is the configuration on Monday evening.
Now the star HD191250 is way up at the top of the image. Jupiter’s biggest moon, Ganymede, was transiting the face of Jupiter, so it’s there, but not showing. Another of Saturn’s brighter moons, Rhea, has also joined the party.
Saturn is currently leading the moon race, with 82 known moons. Jupiter has 79. Expect those numbers to get bigger in the future, as there are probably hundreds of small objects near them awaiting better orbit determinations.
And, just for fun, here’s a link to the known moons in the solar system, and details of their discovery. Be sure to read the last footnote at the bottom!
