On the morning of June 14th, 2023, I had the pleasure to witness my closest Jupiter-Moon conjunction to date, with both celestial bodies coming within about 2ΒΊ of each other.
This was a challenge, as the appulse, the least apparent distance between two celestial bodies, was at 6:45 a.m., well after sunrise. Unfortunately, I had to stop ahead of time, as the contrast was getting way too low. After all, the Sun was rising at 5:28 a.m. that morning.
Gear & Acquisition
After checking with Stellarium, in order to have both the Moon and the planet in the same frame and to maximize details was clear I had to use my Celestron C5 with the Celestron 0.63x reducer. The camera was a ZWO ASI183MC and tracking was done using the Sky-Watcher Az-GTI in alt/az mode. No filters were used.
Data acquisition was done by recording videos with ASICAP, a planetary imaging software part of the ZWO ASIStudio suite, available for Windows and Mac OS X.
Stacking was done with Autostakkert! 3.0, while image post-processing was done with AstroSurface and Adobe Photoshop. All Windows software was running on my Macbook PRO 13β M1 using CodeWeavers CrossOver.
The Image
The image below shows the conjunction at 3:52 UTC time, where a small slice of the Moon and Jupiter both show up in the field of view of my imaging setup.
To capture the whole waning crescent Moon, I needed to do a two-panel mosaic and to reduce the chance of having optical defects showing up in the image, I centered the Moon in the frame and shot a 2 minutes long, 19FPS, full-resolution video, for the upper half and another one for the lower half.
For Jupiter, I centered the planet in the frame and recorded a high-speed, 1-minute-long video using a small ROI.
Finally, I took a single image where both Jupiter and a small edge of the Moon were both visible, so as to know where to place Jupiter in the final image with respect to the Moon.
The best 5% of the frames for each video were stacked to produce the corresponding single images and the Mosaic was created in Photoshop, first by merging the two images of the Moon together with Photomerge, and then Jupiter was manually added using the single image with both celestial bodies visible as a reference
Once I cerated the mosaic, I post-processed and sharpened it mainly in AstroSurface, and used Photoshop again for the last cosmetic adjustments.