Jupiter, Venus & Mercury Conjunction 26th May 2013

Tonight these three planets formed this neat triangle just 3 degrees apart in the evening sky about 30 minutes after sunset (your little finger viewed at arms length is 1 degree).
The alignment is quite rare and wont happen again until October 2015.
In this image, Jupiter is on the left while Mercury is almost vertically above Venus.

My Solar System Collage (so far)

I wanted to make a collage using some of my favourite images of our Solar System.

Its not to scale because I liked this layout and my main aim was to show the vibrant colours.

However I have roughly sized the planets relative to each other.

I still need 4 planets including Earth so its not finished and I'm not sure how to get an image of Earth unless I go to the Moon? So I just need Mars, Uranus and Neptune  .

I couldn't resist  slipping in Comet Panstarrs.

and

Sun with behemoth Sunspot AR1743

Taken 1 hour before sunset prime focus Canon 40d and Meade Etx 105 scope. Using EOS movie record and about 300 frames at 20 fps. Stacked and wavelets in Registax then levels, curves, sharpened then false coloured.

Saturn using a prime focus DSLR and eos_movrec 20130430

I was pleasantly surprised with this image of Saturn. Taken on the same night as the previous post but instead of a webcam I used a Canon 40D looking through my 4" Meade Etx scope tethered to a program called eos_movrec which produces an AVI movie. At first glance the movie looked to bright and lacking any detail but after using a program called PIPP then Registax with some wavelet adjustments this image popped out.

For reference, the image below is one frame of the 1242 frames used to make this image. The frame is of an average quality. Some frames were much more distorted than this one. It show how bad the "seeing" was that night and also shows how good this software is at extracting the planet from the distorted view through our turbulent atmosphere.

Hopefully when "seeing" conditions improve I can get an even better image. That's what make astronomy and astrophotography so interesting. If it was easy it wouldn't interest me.