ArtCentrics

Solar System Objects

This page contains images of various solar system objects and is divided into various sections.

Occultations, Transits and Appulses

This section contains images of Occultations, Transits and Appulses.

An occultation is when one celestial object appears to go in front of another object and hides the first object.  An example of this would be when the moon goes in front of a planet such as mars, mars disappears behind the moon a while and eventually emerges out of the other side of the moon.

A Transit is when one celestial body goes in front of another but is not large enough to hide the object it is going in front of.  An example of this would be when Venus or Mercury go in front of the sun.

An Appulse is more of a close call between celestial objects where they appear to come close to each other by the observer.

The Planets

The Planets
There are nine planets (Including Pluto) in our Solar System.  They are (In order) Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Jupiter, Saturn and Mars tend to be the easiest to image; However it is possible to image Venus, Uranus and Neptune.

Generally to get the best results for planetary imaging, a technique called Lucky Imaging is utilized. 

More information on imaging planets and the sun can be found on my Planetary Imaging Primer webpage.

Meteor Showers and Comets

A comet is generally considered a dirty snowball that is believed to have originated from the Oort Cloud, a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the sun.  The orbit of comets is highly elliptical.  As the comet comes closer to the sun the ice vaporizes into gas and also ejects some of the dirt particles from the comet, many times resulting in two tails, the gas tail becomes ionized and always points directly away from the sun while the dust tail follows the trail of the comet. 

Meteor showers are typically a result of the earth going through the dust trail left behind from a comet, and many times the comet responsible for the meteor shower is known.

Eclipses

There are two types of Eclipses, Solar and Lunar.  A Solar eclipse is when the moon goes in front of the sun, while Lunar eclipse is when the earth's goes in front of the sun and you can see the shadow of the earth cover the moon.

The Sun and the Moon

The Sun and the Moon can offer some of the best imaging targets since they are so large and relatively close to us.