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On March 29, the planet Saturn and the moon aligned perfectly, seeming to touch each other in the night sky.
This relatively common but easy-to-miss event is called a conjunction. And luckily for his fellow Earthmen, astrophotographer Grant Petersen managed to capture the conjunction with the help of a smartphone mounted on a telescope.
Petersen recorded the beautiful picture above from Johannesburg, South Africa, and then shared it on Twitter for the whole world to see.
"It was spectacular," said Petersen in the tweet accompanying his picture. "I'm smiling from one ear to the other, nothing will get me out of this high astronomy."
The image is actually a combination of several photos and shows Saturn just before slipping behind the moon before dawn.
Like many astrophotographers, Petersen said that he was constantly looking for "the next big event of astronomy" that will be visible on his site. Sometimes the event is a comet or asteroid that passes, other times it is the International Space Station zipping by.
Read more: NASA photographed the International Space Station in front of a total solar eclipse
Petersen explained that he used a variety of apps and diaries for astronomy. The Saturn-Moon conjunction caught his eye in January and he came up with a plan to photograph it.
Petersen told Business Insider that he had "a lot of anticipation and enthusiasm for the event", that is to say until the rain hit Johannesburg the night before. But bad weather has emerged to reveal a crisp night sky in time for the conjunction.
"When an event like this happens and everything goes as planned, and [we] can avoid problems like weather, equipment breakdowns or human errors, it's a great achievement, "he said.
Petersen got up at 4 am, or about two hours before the meeting, to arrange and test his equipment. His installation included an 8-inch Dobsonian (a relatively inexpensive, large and powerful telescope), a Galaxy S8 smartphone, an adapter to connect to a lens and an eyepiece.
As Saturn headed for the moon, Petersen recorded it in a 60-fps video. After the conjunction, he processed the images using a technique called stacking, which consists of merging several lower quality images into a brighter, clearer image. Then he shared his best photos on Twitter.
"I felt like a kid at Christmas," Petersen said. "I received a comment that said it reminded them of the first Earthrise photo from the Apollo Missions."
Petersen also took the picture below, which shows how small Saturn looks like, 950 million kilometers from the Earth. The planet seems to be only a tiny fraction of the diameter of the moon, which is itself small: about the width of the tip of your index finger when it is held at arm's length in the night sky.
Petersen said the next big event that he hopes to photograph is the passage of Mercury through the sun on November 11th.
"I'm really looking forward to seeing that already," he said.
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