The
Moon and Jupiter can be seen in close proximity tonight in the night
sky, and with a pair of binoculars you can easily pick out the moons of
Jupiter (Europa, Io, Ganymede & Callisto from Left to Right). Whilst
the Moon looks big Jupiter is over 40 times larger, but being 1500x
farther away at 609 million km it looks pretty small here - but still a
discernible disk. Just like Jupiter, its biggest satellites are
super-sized too at up to nearly twice the size of ours. So grab a pair
of binoculars and gaze upon a another world and its moons over a third
of a billion miles away .....
This image was taken with a Skywatcher 80ED and Canon 7D DLSR. 3 exposures were taken for the Moon (1/200s ISO100), Jupiter's disk (1/1000s ISO3200) and Jupiter's moons (1/125s ISO6400) and composited together in Photoshop to give a result not too dissimilar to that through binoculars.
