Michal Paszkiewicz

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Capturing the moon and Jupiter

Having some nice time for relaxation during the Christmas holidays is great, but this year has been especially great, thanks to my good friend, James, who has let me use one of his telescopes!

Given this great opportunity, within days I have been sitting out at night with my wife, trying to capture some celestial objects.

So here is the first ever (nice) photo we have taken of the moon:

I was absolutely amazed by the details of the moon we could see in our photo. So many craters can be seen with pretty amazing detail!

Next, we pointed our telescope at Jupiter, which was brightly visible. It was incredible looking through the telescope's eyepiece and seeing Jupiter's bands as well as its moons. Taking photos of it proved a bit more difficult. To capture the moons, we needed long exposure and high ISO:

While when we wanted to take a picture of Jupiter's bands, we needed a short exposure time and low ISO, as the planet was so bright:

As you can see, the planet is a lot a darker, but the bands are visible, which is incredible, considering it was taken from my backyard, which has plenty of streetlamps shining directly into it.

These photos were all taken using a standard Canon 1200D camera and a Celestron Astromaster 70 telescope, which can be bought online for ~90GBP, so if you already have an SLR camera, the kit to take pictures like this is very accessible and I encourage everyone to get their own ones!