Stargazing from Phuket in 2020. Includes 4 days of the “Great Conjunction” or “Christmas Star” of Jupiter and Saturn coming together in the sky. Music purchased on AudioJungle.
Bored to tears and armed only with my Canon 6D with a 24-70mm lens and very cheap tripod. I tried to catch the Geminid meteor shower but only caught a small one towards the end.
Here’s the story of the lightning freeze frame: I was monitoring the shooting situation when I saw that particular strike and knew the camera had caught it. I waited for hours for the timelapse to finish and rushed to copy and find that photo with the strike I had witnessed. I brought it into Lightroom and in my haste removed two bright spots in the left part of frame in the sky and exported some watermarked web-sized jpegs.
I had removed these two bright spots because in recent shoots I noticed there were some hot pixels on my sensor and I thought these were particularly bad ones. My camera is around 7 years old and has nearly 200k shutter clicks so it’s no surprise.
I sent my friends and family the strike photo with the two bright spots removed. As I got reactions my mother sent a link to an article about the Great Conjunction (an event not seen since 1623) saying you should be able to see Saturn and Jupiter in the evening sky. I then did the proper process for timelapse files and realized those two spots were indeed Saturn and Jupiter. You could see them in the sky all throughout the timelapse. I then had to revert the edits and send out a revised version of the photo with an explanation. Good timing mom!
I continued to shoot the Great Conjunction for the next few days as long as the sky was clear.