Astro photos from 8-11-2020

Those are great shots! Well done!

I did not realize that- the first pic is very cool.

Some really beautiful pics there, Chris. Great job!

   Cool! Thank you! I don't know why I missed this for two days.

First of all, I had to remix Saturn. This 2nd try going back to the original out-of-camera files and starting from scratch on the Saturn image, and some minor retouching on the moon image. How I made all of these planet/moon photos work is I had to shoot them with different exposures, process them separately and differently. Then do the align/stack process to get a .TIF file of the planet and a .TIF file of an over-exposed planet and moons. Touch-up, cut-paste, add labels, add watermark, export as 1:1 jpeg.



Below is what Stellarium shows where it thought the moons were in-orbit on the night of 8-11-2020. I used this as my reference to label. Great program to have BTW.



Then I made versions of Jupiter and Saturn minus the labels and I took liberty to enlarge a bit.





But wait, there is a meteor shower! Well I only captured 2 verified meteors.  There were at least 4 verified satellites leaving trails across multiple exposures.

These are simple 1-exposure shots. The 2nd photo also is showing a satellite to the right. I know that is the case since it appears across multiple photos.





But since I have 143 images taken over 1 hour and 10 minutes, I had to have fun with them. Mostly just using different options in the astro-stacking program called Sequator.

Straight-up stack with foreground frozen like I would do with a Milky Way image.



Same but using the "Aggressive" light-pollution filter. The Milky Way at this time of night extended nearly straight-up overhead and fades in intensity back down into the northeastern sky. That is the faint part of the MIlky Way near the right edge.



"Align Only" checkbox on, no freeze foreground



"Make Star Trails" mode, which really just eliminates the step of aligning the stars. You can see the rotation centering barely left of Polaris as I was aimed north where the Persied meteors are approaching from.



Same star-trails except I checked on an option for making the trails appear to have more motion.



But none of this is the photo I was dreaming up for the night. Not original, but I wanted a composite shot of the meteors radiating out from their origin point in the sky. I needed 8-12 or more meteors, likely several more hours of being there past my bedtime on a weeknight. And to complicate things, I really made a bad choice of foreground composition here to do this. Trees sticking up in the middle of the horizon really makes it tough to stack things and look good. Here is how it would look reduced down to 3 images star-aligned and stacked.



I added 1 more "plain" image and then turned on the "Freeze Foreground" option of Sequator. It came out kind of serviceable. I had to clean up artifacts left behind using GIMP, but I tried to step very lightly.



So that concludes this episode of Fun With Meteors!

Thanks Jeff! If you use imagination, the 1st star-trails photo looks like an inter-dimensional vortex just opened and is going to swallow Earth.