My father, a true photographer at heart, who is the main inspiration to my photography always gave me his cameras and lenses to play with and off i’d go capturing, well, what ever looked pretty! One thing I used to love shooting was sunsets and the night sky using tripods and long exposures, but as kid i never had the resources to equipment that I have today.

Last night gave me the opportunity to revisit my childhood as a photographer and after my wife mentioned that there was a great opportunity to catch a glimpse of Jupiter off i went into the garden with my telephoto lens and tripod.

Photographing Jupiter wasn’t easy as we live in valley of trees and houses and by the time I set up, leveled my tripod and corrected my exposures it dipped further into the horizon. I eventually did manage to capture a glimpse of the bright planet with a  couple other surprises…

You can make out Jupiter as a bright star in the trees to the bottom right. And to my surprise, after the 30s exposure, the ‘Kite’ constellation was clearly identifiable in the photo which was not visible to the naked eye due to the glaring light of the moon and the pollution of surrounding artificial light.

After examining the photo in my developing suite I was shocked to notice a very coincidental line of red and white dots and realised that at the time of exposure I had captured the flight of a plane passing across the center of the photo… Perfect timing!

The Moon

Once Jupiter was retiring for the night I focused my attention to the moon. After zooming in all the way using my Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM. I used the ‘Live View’ function on my 5D II, zoomed into the image (x10) and focused manually. I enabled the mirror lockup and set the timer on the camera to take the pic so that I wouldnt shake the camera using the shutter release.

I shot manually using an aperture 8.0f, and 1600 ISO, I also enabled the Image stabilisation on the lens (just incase). I prioritised and used a fast shutter speed of 1/320s to prevent camera shake.

The resulting image, after cropping in post edit, was beautifully sharp with the craters clearly visible. The question is what could be achieved if i fork out £15k on a EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM with an extender!