Neptune and Triton Animation Sep. 30 - Oct. 2, 2008

One image was taken each night from September 30 to October 2 2008, to create this 3 frame animation. All images are a composite of 5 10 second black & white exposures taken with the Takahashi CN-212 telescope and SBIG ST-402 camera.

Neptune can be seen moving in it's orbit, and it's largest moon Triton can be seen moving in it's retrograde orbit around Neptune.

Note that in this image the size of Neptune's disk appears to be larger than it actually is. This is because of the longer exposure time needed to capture the much fainter moon.