Saturn Rise

I had the pleasure of seeing an early screening of ‘Interstellar’ and was absolutely blown away! During one scene (no spoilers, don’t worry) when Saturn is beautifully depicted on the giant IMAX screen in all of its glory, I remembered I had a photo of this planet as well…sort of. This isn’t actually Saturn as seen through a telescope, but rather the digital representation from the Adler Planetarium’s live show, Destination Solar System. This composite is made of two images. The image of Saturn was photographed as it was projected on the dome while I was taking some test shots for a project I worked on with Adler last spring. The skyline image was an aerial shot I took just before sunrise.  

Compositing it was a fairly simple process. Once I had dropped out the background from the skyline (here’s the original shot) it was simply a matter of placing the star field and Saturn in a pleasing position. In addition, I added grey gradient behind the skyline to give the viewer a sense of atmosphere. There was already plenty of ‘atmosphere’ in the skyline plate, but the border between the night sky, and building silhouettes was too harsh and needed to be softened.
 
One last thing….If you plan to see Interstellar, go see it in IMAX!