EarthSky Community Photos

Submit your photo here. Comment or upvote on photo pages. Search via photographers' names. More improvements coming! To help, please donate.

Patrick Prokop
Savannah, GA
07/03/2019
01:00 am

Equipment Details:

Celestron 11" Edge Telescope with Explore Scientific 3x Barlow extender, Altair Hypercam 294c Pro tec camera

Post-processing Details:

Best 2500 of 5,000 images stacked in Autostakkert then post-processed in Photoshop CC

Image Details:

The 6th Planet from the Sun ... Saturn.
Saturn is the 'other' planet in the nighttime sky now following bright and mighty Jupiter, which you can't miss, shining brightly medium high in the southern sky at 11 pm. Saturn is about 2 hours behind back to the left of Jupiter and shines more as a dull somewhat bright yellow. Saturn is at its best viewing for the year as it reaches 'opposition' on July 9, that is, the night that the earth is exactly between the sun and Saturn in sight, but not in distance. The earth is about 93.2 million miles from the sun now while Saturn will be 841.4 million miles from us then. I took this picture shortly after midnight, July 3 from my backyard. On July 9 it will be roughly a half million miles closer than it was at the time of this picture.