Image Salvage Operation: The Grand Conjunction

Many of you may have been following my Journey the evening of 12/21/20, when I was attempting to photograph a once-in-a-lifetime conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. An unforecasted wall of fog rolled in early, before the sun set, so sadly I did not have much to work with, and I assumed the evening was completeley ruined. I even drove for hours attempting to outrun the fog (every time I set up my equipment though it would catch up to me).  However, I did manage to take many pictures through the fog (refer to the second image in the series).

At first glance they don't look like much, just a faintly visible circle against a gray background, with Saturn essentially invisible. But I captured thousands of such images, and if there is one thing I leanred from this hobby, it's that nothing is impossible. After stacking about a thousand images, I boosted image contrast and there they were, Saturn, Jupiter, and even some moons.  Check out that third image in the series. 

Cleaning up the image from here was relatively easy, with Topaz Denoise doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I use star charts from that night to determine which of the grainy white blobs were actually moons, and made selective masks to exempt them from the heavy noise reduction I did so the moons wouldn't be erased. I captured just the red channel that night, so to give the planets color I used data from a previous night, with adjustments made so it matched the position of Jupiter. Look at the fourth image to see how that turned out.

The final composition was created by using a shot captured with my DSLR of the scene when the fog had just started to creep in on one of the locations I travelled to that night. It had no planetary detail, but accurately captured the glow of the planets scattering through the sky and how things appeared visually through my finderscope as I frantically set up my equipment.

Overall, hope you enjoy. It was quite a challenge getting to this final image, which is why I didn't simply do it the evening of the conjunction, but overall I'd say I'm happy I was able to salvage something from all my work that night.