This one is a challenge. It’s very small and it’s always close to the sun (as well as presently being 88 million miles away!). However, as it’s approaching it’s best elongation from the sun for the year, now is the time to take pictures of it.
This one is the result of stacking about 300 frames from a video of about 2000 individual frames. A narrow band Infra-Red (742nm) filter helps to improve the contrast against the evening sky.
A wonderfully clear evening for photographing this conjunction of Mercury and the moon. Taken with a Canon EOS 350D with a 300mm lens.
After the regular Tuesday meeting of the Imaging Group was somewhat washed out the next clear opportunity was Thursday. This composite picture shows Saturn with 5 of it’s moons at 2100 GMT 1-5-2008.
There’s some photoshop trickery here to replace the very overexposed planet with a correctly exposed one.
From the left, the moons are; Titan, Iapetus (very faint), Rhea, Tethys and Dione.
