Jupiter, Saturn, and M31

Last night I got some good photos of Jupiter and Saturn as the neared conjunction. Here’s one with four moons of Jupiter and two of Saturn’s.

That was a four-second exposure with ISO 800. Jupiter and Saturn aren’t very detailed because their exposure is blown out, but I got the moons.

Here’s an image of M31, the galaxy in Andromeda. This was made with ten exposures of 30 seconds at ISO 800, at the same scale as the Saturn and Jupiter image. In San Francisco I can’t see the galaxy at all with the naked eye. I do not know what that black spot is; it appeared in all the M31 images. The smaller galaxies are M32 and M110.

Here’s a composite of that image on top of a scan from a page of The Cambrodge Atlas of Herschel Objects. This shows that the galaxy in Andromeda is even bigger than what I was able to photograph.

I got two images of the moon. The first, at 1/100th of a second, perfectly exposes the bright side.

The second image I exposed for 2 seconds. That blew out the bright side but allowed the dark side, illuminated by Earthshine, to be seen.

By “dark side” I mean the side not illuminated by the sun.