MOON AND SATURN CONJUNCTION Taken by Dennis Simmons on August 12, 2019 @ Brisbane, QLd

We were treated to some beautiful, clear skies for a Moon/Saturn conjunction tonight, with the Moon just clearing the trees on my eastern horizon before the ingress phase. I was so enthralled watching the Moon’s edge creeping up on Saturn that I almost forgot to press the “Record” button in FireCapture. Here are composite images of the ingress and egress phases, with consecutive captures exposed differently for Saturn and then the Moon, as the difference in their brightness range was quite astronomical! For the ingress phase, the lunar terminator helped mitigate some of this huge difference in brightness, and I was able to position Saturn accurately based upon common craters overlapping in each recording. For the egress phase, the lunar limb was completely blown out and so I had to match the profile of the limb in order to position the correctly exposed Saturn image over the correctly exposed lunar image. All images recorded with a Tak Mewlon 210, Tak x1.6 Extender and ZWO AIS224MC CMOS camera. Cheers Dennis