On March 29, Saturn and the moon perfectly lined up, seeming to touch in the night sky.

Even though looks surreal, is in fact a phenomenon called conjunction, and South African astrophotographer, Grant Petersen managed to capture this event using a smartphone mounted to a telescope.

The picture was captured from Johannesburg, South Africa, and it was shared on Petersen’s official Twitter account accompanied by the sentence: “That was frickin spectacular. I’m smiling from ear to ear, nothing gonna get me off this astronomy high”.

Well, actually the image is a pastiche of several other images, and it shows Saturn just before it slipped behind the moon.

Like many astrophotographers, Petersen is only studying the sky and looking for important astronomical events.

Petersen also took the photo that you’re going to see bellow. It shows how small Saturn looks when it is 1.5 billion km away from Earth. As you can see it looks roughly smaller than a star in the night-sky.

Finally, Petersen said that the next big event he hopes to capture is the transit of Mercury across the sun on November 11.

Article created by Daniel © Alien Star