Venus and Jupiter are in conjunction these days, meaning they’re about 3 to 5 degrees apart in the western sky at night. Very easy and very cool to see them. I’ve been seeing them up there the past several nights and last Tuesday night I thought, what the heck! I’ll take a picture! I figured it’d just be two dots, but I would know what they were when it popped up in my screen saver and knowing I had seen them with my own eyes would be so cool all over again. 🙂 Here’s the picture:
Jupiter on the left and Venus on the right; Conjunction of March 13, 2012
But here’s where it gets really cool. I took three frames with tripod and auto-timer, not really sure how well they’d turn out, then packed it in and went back inside. Looking at them on my computer I noticed some suspicious specks… and if I had not seen the same specks in all three frames I never would have believed it, but I actually captured some of Jupiter’s moons!!
Enlargement from the photo above of Jupiter, Io, and Europa I think, March 13, 2012
According to this, I believe the speck just above the large blob (which is Jupiter) is Io, and the one above that is Europa. This is with just my camera — not a telescope! My camera is a Nikon Coolpix S4 — not even a DSLR with a serious lens, but what I guess you could call a ‘souped up’ snapshot camera… I’ve never seen another camera design like it. It has a focal length of 38-380mm, or 10x optical. I was at max optical zoom for these shots of course. There’s more digital zoom on top of that, but I… never go there.
I am so impressed all over again with my little 7 year old camera… I was impressed when I bought it that I could just about fill the frame with the moon! I mean Jupiter!! And two of its moons!! How cool is that?!?
zorgor 