I woke up at 4:30am to capture the Mars-Jupiter conjunction!

Hey everyone! This is my photo of the Mars-Jupiter conjunction of 2024.

I woke up at 4:30am to prep my scopes and grab this shot. The little one is a Seestar S50, which has a wide lens that I used to gauge the composition. The big one is a 6SE, a dedicated planetary astrophotography scope.

I tried to get a shot with my phone through the scope. It was unbelievable how close they were in the sky; you could see them through the eyepiece at the same time, which means they were much less than a full-moon's diameter apart.

I spent too much time staring at the view through my telescope that the sun was coming up fast before I started taking data! But here was a last quick widefield shot, you can see the conjunction near the top.

To make the image, I first focused on Mars, then Jupiter. I zoomed into both with a 2x barlow and piped the image to a ZWO ASI224MC, which is designed for this kind of astrophotography. It records images at 100s of FPS. I then go through and select the best frames where the atmospheric turbulence was low ("lucky imaging") and average them to produce the final image.

Here's the shot for Jupiter. I got very lucky, the seeing was pretty good and you could see a ton of detail, as well as the moons super clearly.

This was also my first ever shot of Mars, and I was so happy I caught some surface details! That big dark slash is Terra Sirenum, a large feature on Mars. More to come on Mars as it starts to rise earlier!

I used this image from my Seestar S50 to place the finalized Mars and Jupiter images back into a composited image, and matched the sizes and distances as best as I could.

This is the final result. I'm super pleased with how it came out, it looks very similar to how it looked when I used just my eye, which is what I'm always striving for with these kinds of images. What a magical event--we won't get another like it until 2033!

Also, since this is my first Mars, I got to update my growing collection of solar system shots! :) just the Sun, Mercury, Venus, and hopefully Pluto to go. Maybe a comet as well.