Closest opposition

Where possible, I like to take pictures of the objects in the night sky. Unfortunately, I do not own a telescope and I am limited by the basic equipment I own, which is an Olympus E-PL7 camera and a standard 40-150mm zoom kit lens. The moon is one of my favourite subjects but once in a while, I get lucky with photographing Jupiter. The past few nights had been bad for photography because of the rainy weather or thick cloud cover. But last night was clear enough. As I stepped out of the house to throw away some rubbish, I glanced upwards hoping to see the planet which I knew, at 591 million kilometres away, would be at its closest to earth in 70 years. And I did see the planet. It wasn't as bright as I thought, but it was bright enough for the camera. For the record, Jupiter at opposition occurred at midnight on 26 September 2022, Malaysia time. Thus, when I took this picture on the 27th of September at 11.23pm, it was already almost 24 hours later. Only three of the four Galilean moons could be observed. From the top down, they were Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. Io couldn't be viewed because it was transiting across Jupiter's surface last night.

EarthSky.org described Jupiter as "more like a failed star, not massive enough or hot enough inside to spark thermonuclear fusion reactions, but some 2½ times more massive than all the other planets in our solar system combined. So for Jupiter to shine as stars do, you’d need some 80 Jupiter’s – rolled into a ball – to be hot enough inside to spark thermonuclear reactions." All I can say is thank goodness for that. If Jupiter had been big and hot enough for its own thermonuclear reactions, our solar system could have had two hot stars in rotation around one another and life on Earth might not have been possible at all. And hence, no blog by SS Quah to read. 😁