We finally had a clear night tonight.
Looking from the top of the house I could perfectly see Jupiter and Saturn together. It might *just* have been possible to separate them with the naked eye, but with the camera they could be easily separated. With the strongest lens, pictures showed them as separate dots (see below, Saturn is the fainter of the two, at about 11 o clock). Then we tried the binoculars, which also clearly resolved two flecks of light.
They were higher above the horizon than I had expected, and the night was *really* clear, which meant there was a little more time.
So I wrecked the study digging out the 2 1/2 inch refractor bought (from Lidl!) 13 or so years ago, and half assembled it. No spotting scope, no fine controls. And with that we could see the two planets, in the same image, as more than mere dots. The paler Saturn was lower due to image inversion and slightly to the right. Saturn's rings were discernible - everyone saw it as ovoid, and I think I could just make them out. And there was a string of three tiny pearl-like moons stretching out from Jupiter.
Sadly, I can't (yet!) hook the DSLR up to the telescope. But just seeing the two planets together like that was quite amazing.
From the Nasa Website:
'What makes this year’s spectacle so rare, then? It’s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night, as it will for 2020, allowing nearly everyone around the world to witness this “great conjunction.”'
(Click on the images to see them clearly)
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