Moonracer

Very nice images there John!

Couple of questions; which camera did you use? And did you manage to get jupiter's moons with a single 4 second exposure or stacked?

The reason I'm asking is that looking back over my shots from Friday night, I can't see any sign of the moons in an 8 second exposure... Just noise.... But that is with a lowly coolpix 990.... none of this expensive digital SLR gear for me.... :lol:

Cheers,
John.

P.S. I took mine at aperture F7.0 as I was trying to get foreground detail as well... so that might explain it.

I used a Canon 20D with a 70-200mm lens. This is a 8 MP camera and I always shoot in raw mode, this lets me scrape another 2 or 3 stops of light from an image.

You did the right thing by using F7 for depth of field on the foreground but with the aperture stopped down it tends to cause star like diffraction spikes along the aperture blades from bright objects like the moon.

There is another method of increasing the dynamic range of an image and that is to use a graduated neutral density filter in front of the lens. Another idea is to expose for the foreground and then during the exposure bring a card over the lens from top to bottom, could be tricky to get right though.

John,
Those are fabulous images, the second one looks as if the moon is rolling along the cloud edge bringing some of it along, real halloween stuff
like you'd see on an album cover.

Given the first images, does anyone have keen enough eyesight to see jupiters moons in that configuration with the naked eye ??

Again, very atmospheric magazine quality imagers there. You should submit them to Sky&telescope.

John, I 2nd what Dave has already said, Definitely forward these to S&T, they're in with a shout!

Keith..

Thanks guys!

Do you know what the submission guidelines are for S&T?

class images