Moon & M48 Conjunction Recreation - May 10, 2019
On or around April 19 2020 I took about 45 minutes of of M48. I pre-processed the data with Pixinsight and stacked, but the resulting image didn't inspire me, so I set it aside.
On May 29 it was clear and there was a nice 1/2 moon, so I captured a bunch of images and stacked 13 of them with Registax6. I used R6 for wave lets as well. I've made a few pictures like this moon already and this one wasn't as sharp as those other (seeing wasn't great).
Then I got to thinking about maybe making a collage. I took the moon and M48 at different focal lengths (2000mm and 200mm, respectively) so the Moon was way more magnified. I scaled the moon to various sizes and shared a few with some friends for opinions. As I said, this isn't really photography any more - it's more like digital photographic collage.
Anyway, one of the folks whom I shared with sent me a link to a conjunction that happened in May 10 2019. It looked a lot like this if you were in my backyard in suburban Chicago. So I set out to recreate what that event would have looked like provided we could magnify it a bit and see with 20+ stops of dynamic range.
Needless to say this is an artist's impression of an astronomical event using photographs taken by the artist a year after the event. By happy circumstance the moon's phase was very much the same as what's pictured here.
