A couple of nights ago, even with our light-pollution here in SoCal, I was able to clearly see both Jupiter and Saturn from my backyard. Using a 45X spotting scope I could easily see Jupiter plus at least four of its Moons. But the real show that night was Saturn. It's in opposition to the sun (as is pretty much Jupiter as well) so it's very bright. It's also at about its closest approach to Earth (which will be the case for the next couple of months) but what really makes it look great is that it's tipped toward the Earth at about the steepest angle ever achieved, meaning that you can see its rings in all their glory.
Here are my pictures from the other night. Note that they were all taken with a Sony a6000 mirrorless camera with an image resolution of 24MP. I used a 400mm preset lens (equivalent to 600mm on a 35mm SLR) set at f11.0 and shot at ISO 100.
The first image is of Jupiter and at least four moons (you may not be able to see them on your screen but looking at the original image I can see them). Note that none of these images are full-frame but rather have been cropped so as to magnify the image to where you can see the subject matter (note that these images, as you see them here, are about what it looked like when I was looking through that 45X spotting scope).
The exposure time on this image was 0.3 seconds. Now of course the image of Jupiter itself is washed-out as I had to use that exposure in order to capture an image of the Jovian Moons, and that means that all detail from the planet was lost.
Now this is also a shot of Jupiter, but this time I changed the exposure so that I got a better image of the planet itself, in this case I left the aperture set at f11.0 but changed the shutter speed to 1/30 of a second (if you look close, you can actually see some hint of detail of the planet's surface with its streaks of gases).
And here is the best photo I was able to be get of Saturn. This was shot still using f11.0 but a speed of 1/20 of a second. Of course, being that Saturn is both smaller than Jupiter and further away, it appears as a smaller object in the sky.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pics...
OCU
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