Saturn & Jupiter

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Saturn & Jupiter

by JackDesBwa 2020-07-20 19:30

This photograph depicts a real scene, but the depth was added afterwards. It was inspired by a picture of Michael A Learmonth (http://www.3dphoto.net/forum/index.php/topic,12439.0.html). Saturn is on the left [dimmer & farther] and Jupiter is on the right [brighter & closer]. The Milky Way and the stars are far far away.

I took 23 photographs of this part of the sky, developed the RAWs into TIFFs without noise correction, aligned them, and applied a median filter on the set (this keeps only the central value from all the images for each pixel) which rejected the noise pretty well. The orange parasitic light of the nearby villages is visible because the planets were low, near the horizon. To finish the 2D treatment, I enhanced the Milky Way a bit, and rotated a few degrees to have the ecliptic horizontal (this will avoid to align the pair afterwards, because the planets follow it).

To add depth on the planets, I used the photo that M.A.L. took on July 12. I matched the stars of his photo on the same stars in mine, and thus got the position at which the planets were 7 days before my shot. I recreated a fake background to erase the planets of the right image, and placed a copy of them in the new positions so that the photo looks almost like it could have been a few days before if I did it and if there were similar conditions.

Since the Earth is moving fast around the sun, it is like a cha-cha with astronomically large base, although smaller than the photo of inspiration. The planets are also moving around the sun, so their apparent position relative to the stars are not totally due to parallax though.

-- 2020-07-19, LX15 + added depth

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