Yesterday evening I spontaneously made a photo of Jupiter with my Canon DSLR, a (300 mm) zoom lens, and a tripod. 🙂 I was really surprised that I was able to identify the four Galilean moons Europa, Io, Ganymed, and Callisto.
I did not expect much as I made the shot from my balcony with room and street lights on. Here in Munich we have a lot of light pollution. At first I thought the small spots were lens flares. Also chromatic aberration is pretty visible due to the manual focus, but I’m still proud of the photo because I did not expect anything special: I first had to compare it with the software-rendered constellation of the moons around the time the photo was taken (see below) to be sure.
Excellent shot! I did the same about a year ago, was zooming in with an old Nikon P520 with 40x optical zoom, just playing at getting some astro photos. When I reviewed the images, I too discovered that I had what I initially thought was lens flare, but every single image had the same three dots beside Jupiter. Amazing what new digital camera technology is capable of. Thanks for sharing.