The Solar System from a balcony
5 Solar System objects, 28 nights of observations.
The Moon, the Sun and the planets are shot in a completely different way from nebulae. No hours of exposure are needed: the telescope records short video at thousandths of a second, and only the sharpest frames, caught in a moment of steady air, go into the stack.
The main enemy here is not light pollution but the heat of the city: the air above the roofs trembles and the planet's disk "swims". The Sun needs a separate filter that passes less than a thousandth of the light. No percentages or goals here, just the best attempts.
Each target rewards something different. The Moon shows the most relief along the line between day and night, which shifts every evening. Sunspots change from day to day, and near the peak of the cycle the disk is rarely clean. Saturn shows its rings and their tilt, Jupiter its cloud belts and four moons that line up differently every night, and Mars is only worth chasing in the weeks around opposition, when its disk is several times larger.
