Planetary & Lunar Photography

These pictures are a collection of photographs taken of the moon and planets.  I anticipate replacing them with better shots over time.

Mars Opposition, August 2003

In August of 2003, Mars and earth made their closest conjunction in the last 55,000 years!  This was a great opportunity to photograph mars even though she lay low in the Southeast.  The above photographs were taken on August 15th, 18th, 19th and 27th.  Each of the images was taken with the 12" lx200 and my nikon Coolpix 4500 and processed in Registax.  Each of the images above is a composite of anywhere from 20 to 100 images.

Saturn Opposition, December 2003

Taken Dec 2nd 2003 with my Nikon Coolpix 4500.  This is a digital stack of about 100 raw images taken at 1/30th of a second and combined with registax.  Click on the image for a wide field view.

Taken December 18th with the Coolpix 4500.  100 images taken at 1/8th of a second each with a 12mm eyepiece.  Combined and processed in Registax.

My first attempt at digital astrophotography!  The image on the left is of saturn, 20 frames stacked of 1/30th of a second each using a Nikon Coolpix 4500.  The image on the right is of jupiter, 10 frames of 1/30th of a second stacked.  Both images were created using Registax.