This is a dawn scene with three of the inner solar system’s rocky or “terrestrial” worlds in one image — four if you count the Earth as well! This is a panorama of the waning crescent Moon above the two inner planets, Mercury and Venus, shining here as morning “stars” in the pre-dawn sky, Nov. 12, 2020. Mercury is lowest near the horizon and brighter Venus is higher, below the Moon. Mercury was two days past its greatest western elongation, placing it about as high as it gets and in a favourable elongation on an autumn morning, with the ecliptic angled up as high as it gets for the year in the dawn sky. Favourable evening elongations of Mercury in the western sky occur in spring. All the worlds were in Virgo, not to imply any astrological significance! The star Spica is between and to the right of the planets. At far right is the distinctive quadrilateral figure of the constellation of Corvus the crow just rising in the southeast. This is a panorama of 2 segments, each 10 seconds with the Sigma 50mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 200. I blended in a shorter 2-second exposure for the Moon to prevent its disk from being too overexposed and to show the Earthshine. Stitched in Adobe Camera Raw. A mild Orton glow added with Luminar 4 to soften the image and brighten the colours.
This is a rich region for star clusters and nebulas on the Cassiopeia-Cepheus border: The bright open star cluster Messier 52 is at upper left, and below it is the Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635. Below the Bubble is the aptly named Lobster Claw Nebula, Sharpless 2-157 showing subtle shades of red and pink. The small bright nebula to the right of the Bubble is the unnamed NGC 7538. The large nebula at upper left is the Cave Nebula, Sharpless 2-155. However, the entire field is filled with faint nebulosity as well as small intense red patches. A small yellowish star cluster at lower right is NGC 7419. This is a stack of 10 x 8-minute exposures through the William Optics RedCat 51mm f/4.9 astrographic refractor with the red-sensitive Canon EOS Ra camera at ISO 800, and blended with a stack of 4 x 15-minute exposures through the Optolong L-Enhance narrowband filter, with the EOS Ra at ISO 3200, to make up for the nearly 3 stops loss of light from the filter. But it really pops out all the faint nebulosity. This was the first use of the add-on filter drawer from Starizona, which facilitates adding and removing a 48mm filter into the light path without having to remove the camera and risk field rotation. It worked very well. Guiding was with the Lacerta MGEN 3 stand-alone autoguider, which also controlled the camera shutter and applied dithering of 10 pixels between each frame to reduce thermal noise without having to apply LENR in camera or dark frames. However, the temperature was -16° C this night so thermal noise was likely low anyway! But the dithering doesn’t hurt! All images were stacked, aligned and mean combined in Photoshop with the filtered set blended with a Lighten blend mode. Taken from home November 12, 2020, using the Astro-Physics Mach1 mount.
Twice a year around the equinoxes geostationary satellites can flare in brightness when they are opposite the Sun and reflecting sunlight directly back to the viewer. This captures a string of geostationary satellites flaring near the opposition point, here below Mars this night, as Mars was just past opposition itself. This was October 17, 2020. The string of satellites appear as stationary points as they are fixed in the sky while the stars trail behind them, here in this stack of fifteen 30-second exposures. So the stars are moving from east to west but the geosats are not. Normally, geosats are very dim but when they flare they do get bright enough to see naked eye. While geosats orbit in the equatorial plane of Earth they appear below the Celestial Equator here (which is the projection of Earth’s equator onto the sky) due to parallax from me observing them from my latitude of 51° North. All exposures 30 seconds at f/2 and ISO 3200 with the Sigma 20mm lens and Nikon D750. Stacked in Photoshop. I framed the scene to capture more geosats to the south as the opposition point moved to due south but clouds moved in. This is looking southeast.
