Five moons

I woke up early today, having waited patiently since about three weeks ago when I learnt that both the moon and Jupiter would be very close together in the dawn sky. True enough, it was a most brilliant sight. When I gazed upwards, there was the crescent moon and slightly above it was a very bright Jupiter. Of course, I took several shots of the brilliant duo in the sky and hoped that one of them would turn out right for me. Here it is below. It was a one-second exposure. The Olympus E-PL7 camera was handheld but braced against the top of a car for stability. Should have brought along my beanbag for extra stability but I forgot.

Two things stood out from this one-second exposure: the first is of course, the light from the earth shining onto the darkened surface of the moon. The earthshine was bright enough for me to see the darker and lighter patches on this surface. And the second was, of course, Jupiter's four visible Galilean moons, the only ones that can be seen with a telescope - or in my case, a tele-zoom lens - from earth.

Sometimes we are lucky to be able to see all four moons, and sometimes we see less than four because the moons happen to have moved either in front of or behind their mother planet. Today, I was lucky to see all four of the Galilean moons lined up properly. The second picture below is a digitised magnification of Jupiter and its moons. Not very sharp when magnified, though. I reckon that my pictures would have had a better resolution if I was equipped with a professional lens, but I don't.