Get ready for the Great Conjunction

Start practising now to get your best images of Saturn and Jupiter together in December

How you plan is up to you, but here are a few pointers. A series of wide-field images is a good way to show the planets in context with a horizon, but bear in mind that 6.1 arcminutes is a small angular size. If you intend to take photos of the Great Conjunction at the same scale through to December, by the time you get to within a few days of the event, the pair will lose their duality, appearing as a single dot in the sky in wide-field photos.

You can decide to close in on them now, choosing a field of view that shows both planets virtually filling the frame. They can be shown coming closer as separate entities, up to the point of conjunction. The closeness of the conjunction may cause problems regardless. An alternative approach is to use a wideangle setup up to the point where they start to get close. Then, make a feature in your presentation of having increased your image scale; this will free you up for capturing the final conjunction image, with close-up photos taken through a long focal length lens or a camera attached to a scope.

Great expectations

At Great Conjunction, there’s the exciting prospect of being able to image both planets as discs in the same field of view. Here, a scope is recommended, as it’s the best method of increasing image scale to optimise the field of view to the separation of the planets. Using a planetary camera at a low image scale will allow you to capture multiple frames for registration-stacking, giving an opportunity to produce sharp results. Remember, it may also be possible to capture both planets using a smartphone camera held up to the eyepiece of a scope.

With both methods, it’ll pay to practise early.

Recommended equipment: Full frame camera with a lens of focal length 80mm or a non-full frame camera with a 50mm lens. Tripod and remote shutter release.

 Send your images to: gallery@skyatnightmagazine.com