Moon & Saturn occulation: First attempt
On 25th July 2024 4:30AM in Singapore, Moon and Saturn will be right next to each other and I decided to try and photograph the special occassion. The equipment I have planned to use is my Celestron 9.25 and Fujifilm XH2 as those are the longest reach and highest megapixel count in my arsenal.
Original plan was qiute simple: Use the Celestron 9.25 with a 2x barlow, then shoot the night scape in sections. Stack those sections and finally make a high resolution mosaic. However, I encountered a few problems that night that gave me a hard time trying to execute my plan so I decided on a simple no barlow low-res stitch with no stacking for the below result:
Problems encountered that I have to solve for the next attempt:
Bad bad terrible polar alignment. Because of this, Moon and Saturn drifts out of view too fast for video taking with 2x barlow.
Focus. Very hard to nail focus on Saturn because of the terrible seeing and it always drifting out of view does not help either.
Patience. The 2 main problems above + staying up all night + still having to go to work caused me to just “finish it” which in turn lead to the rushed final result.
Conclusion:
Personally, am happy with the result above for a first time try out with my new equipments. But definitely could have spent more time to focus on the moon so it would be sharp in the final image as well. Hope to correct all my mistakes above when next shoot comes.
