Hi there, in case you haven't heard, Jupiter and Saturn are coming together in a few weeks
. The two planets were out last night and the night before, although last night there was a bit of cloud around which made the test difficult. I took a quick and dirty iPhone image, and also imaged the two planets separately with my C9.25, f/0.63 reducer and ASI224MC but using the same camera settings to see how it would go. I set the maximum histogram level for Jupiter to be up around 90%, which still left some dynamic range for Saturn. These were taken at an elevation of around 22 degrees each, which is similar to where they could be visible at conjunction, weather permitting.
Stacked in AS!3, sharpened in Registax, then combined together manually to simulate their approximate positions on Dec 21. This was just focusing on the planets, I didn't really try for the moons this time. This test shows that it should be possible to get a reasonable representation of the two planets with my setup. Not a lot of detail expected on the planets, but some there to be sure.
In order to get the locations, I used a time of 9:11 PM on 21 Dec local time, which is 2020-12-21-10:11 UT, which I figured was as good a time as any (and matched the time I used for the test images above). The image with the SS overlay is attached.
Sky Safari reports a separation of 6' 30.8" at around that time at my location. On the last image shown attached (before I scaled it by 50% to fit on IIS), Jupiter was 67 pixels in diameter, the separation is 810 pixels - approximately 12.1 Jupiter diameters. The original image in the first post shows them separated by 12.7 Jupiter diameters - close enough for government work
Andrew