On the 21st of August I was really looking forward to the Moon occulting Saturn in the early hours of the morning, reappearing as the sky was getting very bright.
I was really hoping to improve on the images I had managed on similar events in the past.
Here’s some of my previous attempts, where I always managed to get The Moon’s limb over-exposed.
But there’s a good reason for that.
24th July 2007.
18th April 2022.
Of course, the image I had in mind of producing of the event now that I had much so much more experience in taking this type of image.
We could say that this image was taken that morning, BUT the Saturn image was captured a couple of hours before the event started.
The Moon image was taken during the egress phase and I erased the not so good image of Saturn out of it, blending in the previous and better Saturn image to the same size and position as I saw and captured.
I know what you are going to say at this point, I’ve gone way too far in producing this.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have put the artificial dark Moon limb on top of Saturn, or even added Titan in its correct position top right?
Or maybe I should never have produced this at all? 😉
But just look around the Internet and on social media where people have posted plenty of these composite or montaged images.
Sadly, these images always get multitudes of likes and re-posted much more often compared to most other folks images that are “The Real Deal”.
Is it wrong or right to do this? As long as it is stated it’s a montage, I guess not, but many don’t.
An image like this from a single image capture is really not possible.
Saturn is a long way from Earth, so although looking reasonably bright in the night sky and through a telescope the amount of light that reaches us is much less than that of The Moon.
To capture Saturn, needs a reasonably long exposure or high gain setting just to make it visible.
This will over-expose The Moon, making it far too bright and washing out lunar surface details.
To capture my videos which will be used to create the final images, I adjusted both exposure and gain settings to just start to over expose The Moons bright limb.
The ingress was trickier as that side of The Moon’s limb was a lot brighter.
This overwhelms and washes out Saturn even more as it got closer to the limb.
The thin interfering cloud also made Saturn dim occasionally as it cut light off from reaching the camera.
On the opposite side, where Saturn will reappear, The Sun was setting over The Moon, creating long shadows on the surface to make that limb a bit darker.
As The Moon was just past full, Saturn also appeared from behind the dark limb.
This made it a lot easier to capture the egress as I could make Saturn a bit brighter during the capture, without overexposing The Moon.
BUT, this was also as dawn was breaking, so the sky was getting reasonably bright by the time Saturn reappeared.
So, how did I do?
Up all night, I made some mistakes and thin cloud did interfere, making getting the the exposures right a bit more of a challenge.
I captured a long video at ingress and egress, observing the event through my 10″ Dobsonian.
The view, especially of egress was exquisite. 🤩
The images were chopped and stacked into sections using AutoStakkert!
The colour was corrected using Registax RGB alignment Tool.
The images were then sharpened using Astro Surface.
Final polish was using Affinity Photo.
Saturn was brightened in the final images by using the tone mapping tool in Affinity Photo, not a composite.
I’m really pleased with what I got in the end and I will probably try not to magnify the image quite so much next time.
I also managed to capture data to give me a “decent” composite image, which is almost as good as the best of them out there. 😉
Just before Ingress.
During Egress:
