Incredible time-lapse video of the Moon occulting Jupiter on Christmas Day

Christmas Day in Canberra was cold and cloudy, and stayed that way into the night, spoiling the chance to capture photos of the near-full Moon and Jupiter in a very close conjunction.

But no such problems over in Brazil, where Rafael de Favari in  São Bernardo do Campo captured an incredible time-lapse sequence of the giant planet not just in conjunction with the Moon, but actually passing behind it! And then of first the Galilean moons then Jupiter coming out from the other side.


He describes the video clip as running at five times normal speed.


This is an incredible sequence. Trusting that this wasn't yet another hoax, I still wonder did he have to Photoshop the individual frames to balance the brightness of the Moon down to match Jupiter? Surely it would have also been difficult to capture two quite different exposures in the one time-lapse—unless you combined the outputs from two cameras running simultaneously?

I can't take a single photo of the moons and planet without the planet being heavily overexposed. I know it's a simple matter in Photoshop to (quite legitimately) combine two differently exposed photos to mimic what your eye sees but the camera can't capture. I just don't know how to do it yet! But a whole sequence like this is a different task...

So I'm curious how he went about capturing this. See if he responds to my questions on the video post.

(Via @RidingWithRobots and @JPMajor)