Shooting The Christmas Star . . .How?

[Drew Bedo]

Went out last evening to shoot the conjunction of Jupeter and Saturn. Set up in a local park just before sunset looking to the SW across a lake. Focused on distant trees for infinity (4x5 format, 210mm lens) . Made one metered sunset exposure and waited.

Eventually it got dark enough to see the Christmas Star of 2020. Over the next twenty or thirty minutes I made another five or six exposures at f/5.6 and f/8 counting "one one thousand . . ." each time, going as high as 12 softly spoken seconds.

I might tryu again tonight, weather permitting.

What should I REALLY do? Using a Zone VI 4x5, 210mm f/5.6 and Velvia 100.

Any knowledgable suggestions instead of just winging it?

[BrianShaw]

I used an iPhone. Enough to say I have a picture but not a very good one.

210800

[Drew Bedo]

No body tried sheet film?

[Drew Wiley]

Note the current thread about "fog". That sums it up for me. No stars.

[cjbecker]

I shot 3 exposures on 35mm ektachrome. Nikon f3 with a 300 2.8. They were essentially snapshots tho. I don't shoot night/star photos. The 3 exposures were F2.8 at 20, 30, 40 seconds. See how the pictures are in a few weeks, i’m not expecting much.

[Corran]

What are you trying to get? Foreground with bright "star"? Or a good image of the conjunction?

If the latter, don't even bother with 4x5. You are just wasting real estate - the planets will be a tiny dot on film. They don't get bigger on larger film, you need more focal length.

If you are doing foreground + "bright star" background, and shooting under moonlight, I would suggest you start counting exposures in minutes, not seconds. Your 12 second exposure will be blank unless you had some light source. I am shooting an image now for 5 hours on 800-speed Instax (f/11) so that will give you an idea (lots of reciprocity failure I have seen). At f/5.6 on TMX I'd be thinking 30 minutes minimum. Maybe 2 hours. Of course the planets and stars will be streaks. Velvia...not great reciprocity. 4 hours? Give it a try. I think my best effort with Provia was about 2 hours. Haven't been all that successful overall.

[reddesert]

It depends what kind of picture you are trying to make.

At closest conjunction Jupiter and Saturn were 0.1 degree = 6 arcmin apart (for comparison, the moon's apparent diameter is 30 arcmin).. This is resolvable with the naked eye. But if you use for example a 210mm lens, their images will be 0.37 mm apart on the film. Enlarge 4x5 to 16x20 and you have two spots 1.4mm apart. That probably isn't going to show the conjunction dramatically. It's a similar problem to trying to take a picture with the moon and a terrestrial foreground. One needs to use a very long focal length lens to make the moon larger than a bright spot.

As for exposure, the planets, like the Moon, are in sunlight. Jupiter is 5.2 AU away from the sun so it's 27 times lower solar intensity than daylight on the earth or moon, and Saturn is further still. But when taking a photo with a dark foreground, any exposure you make to bring out the foreground is going to be enough to make the planets white dots (presuming you have a long enough lens to make them distinguishable on the negative).

[tgtaylor]

The air quality yesterday here in the bay area was poor and clouds began building up over the SW in the late afternoon so it didn't look promising. I had intended on observing the conjunction with the 16x70 Fujinon binoculars mounted on the Manfrotto 475B equipped with an Orion Parallelogram mount but decided it would be a waste of time. But “just in case” I brought along the Fujinon's on a trip to the store. Sure enough Jupiter and Saturn was visible in a sliver of polluted blue sky sandwiched between two banks of clouds so I drove over to the darkest part of the Costco parking lot that offered a view and observed using the cars roof for support until the clouds obscured the view. But I wasn't able to hold the binoculars rock still and the two planets kept darting to and fro in the FOV. I didn't see any sign of Jupiter's (or Saturn's) moons. Conditions were much better this evening – no clouds and and AQI of around 10 – so I set-up the binoculars in a nearby HS parking lot that offered and unobstructed (except for the ubiquitous power lines) view of the SW horizon across its large playground. Jupiter was big and bright in the binoculars with 3 or possibly 4 (I forget) of its moons orbiting. Saturn was dimmer and slightly more displaced to the right of Jupiter than yesterday with its rings at the edge of visibility in the 16x70's. None of Saturn's moons were visible.

[BrianShaw]

Where I live the greatest impediment to a long exposure is aircraft who frequently traverse the sky at that time of the evening.