Scope Diagram Astrocamera.Net - Astrophotography by Dave Kodama

Planetary Marathon


Right to left, all of the naked-eye planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, arranged in order of distance from the Sun, all shown at the same image scale as seen on July 14-15. The diameter of Uranus was 3.5 arcseconds on this evening.

This summer night had all of the planets nicely arranged for a marathon (literally sunset to sunrise) planetary imaging session. Starting from sunset the planets were lined up in the order: Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and Uranus. Neptune was also up, but it was so small and dim and with limited time to find and center it, I opted to pass on it. Mars is approaching its closest point to us, but is still largely obscured by a global dust storm.

Image acquisition: Firecapture / ZWO ASI1600MC camera on Celestron C11 + 2x teleconverter. Image processing: Autostakkert and Lightroom.