Pleiades / Venus conjunction

While we were in Yosemite, there was a close conjunction of Pleiades and Venus. I only had my DSLR, but I brought my Vixen Polarie, so that I can take longer exposures. I took 50 10 sec exposure with my zoom lens at 300mm.

Here is one:

Trees, power lines, clowds, dust and exposure time a little bit too long and/or bad polar alignment...

Developing these images turned out to be rather tricky. Both, DeepSkyStacker and CCDStack converted the RAW color images to black&white images. Luckily, Pixinsight could process the RAW images in color (and converted them on the fly to FITs).

After registering and stacking the 50 subs, I had this image (stretched):

This one looks almost worse then the first sub :-(

But after basic gradient removal, histogram adjustment and curve stretching, I ended up with this:

Pretty nice!