OUR PLANETS⌗

Gazing beyond our moon, one may notice we share our energy source (the Sun) with seven other planetary neighbors! When thinking of our solar system siblings, we may have fond memories of creating a planet diorama, or maybe we reminisce on the great Pluto debate.

Yet, most of us do not have an accurate mental image of these planets, especially because we cannot see them well with our eyes or basic telescopes. At best, we can see tinted specks of light; however, each planet in our solar system has a complex atmosphere, which correlates to a distinct color. Closer (and larger) planets like Mars and Jupiter are easier to capture in color, but father and dimmer planets like Uranus and Neptune are a bit tricker. Keep reading as I explain how I captured each of these beauties!

Planets

Caption: These fuzzy balls may make you reminiscient of a planetary mobile – and you wouldn’t be far off. From left to right, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune share the stage in true color. The special compositions of gases and minerals make each planet reflect a unique color, which I aimed to capture in these (albiet blurry) pictures of our planetary neighbors!

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To create all of my images, I gathered the raw photos from a Mars observation made by myself, a Jupiter observation made by Tiger Nekervis, and Neptune and Uranus observations made by our instructor, Daniel Reichart. For each planet’s image set, I used Afterglow to adjust the planet’s position in the images to be consistent across all images – this helps with aligning and stacking to create our red, green, and blue colored layers!

Because Mars and Jupiter are quite bright, to capture them, we want to use lower-throughput filters than red, green, and blue. Tiger and I took 10 exposures each using U, Halpha, and OIII filters, and when stacking the exposures to create images, I assigned U to blue, Halpha to red, and OIII to green. For each of these planets, I also adjusted the colors by eye. Although the resolution is far from the professional images created by astrophotographers, my main goal was to find a color balance that matched the pros’ images! Below are a side-by-sides of professional images and my own!

Mars My Mars image on the left with a Mars image from OSIRIS on the right.

Jupiter My Jupiter image on the left with a Jupiter image from Casini on the right.

I wanted to bring out Mars’s red-orange surface created by the large amounts of iron oxide (rust) in its soil, but I also wanted to keep the whites of Mars’s permanent ice caps. With Jupiter, I aimed to bring out the saturation of its many bands, which result from the many different chemicals that compose Jupiter and the different velocities of gases and winds in said bands.

Another exciting feature of Jupiter are its four bright moons! Because the brightness of the moons is much smaller than the brightness of Jupiter, we have to adjust the brightness of our image to view the moons, eliminating any detail on Jupiter:

Jupiter’s moons Notice how Io is yellower than the other moons – this is due to the large amounts of sulfur across Io’s surface!

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For Neptune and Uranus, we are able to capture the “natural” color of the planets and their moons by using their surroundings! To observe Neptune, 10 exposures of B, V, and R were taken, and for Uranus, 30 exposures of the same filters were taken. Essentially, by matching our images’ background stars with catalogued stars, we are able to calibrate our images’ colors with the recorded “natural” colors of the stars, revelaing the color of the planets as a byproduct. While Uranus and Neptune are both shades of blue because of the methane in their atmospheres, Uranus dons a paler, greener shade to Neptune’s deeper, truer blue hue. Scientists attribute this difference to the thicker haze that exists on Uranus, which lightens its color. Without the planets’ hazes, Neptune and Uranus would appear nearly equally blue (NASA)!

Again, these images are fairly low-resolution, but check out how they compare to photos taken by professionals!

Uranus My Uranus image on the left with a Uranus image from Voyager 2 on the right.

Neptune My Neptune image on the left with a Neptune image from Voyager 2 on the right.

Similarly to Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have moons! Uranus and Neptune moons Neptune and Triton on the left, Uranus and Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Miranda on the right.

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Rising to the challenge of creating colored images of the planets has been an exciting adventure, and I look forward to continuing to learn about the causes of color in our universe!