Panorama of the Planets
03/24/2004 2330 UTC
There was an alignment of the planets and the moon this week that I thought would make an interesting photograph. So I set the camera on the equatorial mount and took a twelve-frame panoramic of the sky at about 6:45 PM local time. After stitching the frames in Photoshop, this was the result:
The stitching is probably not perfect as there was a large expanse of the sky (between Saturn and Jupiter) where the camera didn't record enough stars to align the frames by. But an interesting (and unusual) arrangement of all the naked-eye objects of the solar system in the sky at one time. (Except the sun, fo course.)
Here's one frame from the set, as well. Mars, the Pleiades, Venus and the moon. (I had to burn the moon in order to expsose for M45, but that brought out the Earthshine, so it's not a bad thing.
This page copyright (c) 2003 - 2004 by David A. Wallace.