Night Out With Jupiter

Photographed from Shanklin Beach on the Isle of Wight.

It was a beautiful night out last night shooting on Shanklin seafront on the Isle of Wight. A thin hazy covering of cloud rendered the Milky Way all but invisible. I didnt realise until I got home however, that I captured a rather amazing photograph of Jupiter!

Jupiter was visible up to around 5am and is the very large bright star (it's a planet actually) that can be seen centre image directly over Shanklin cliff. I have included a crop of Jupiter and you can see it is about 10x larger than any other star in the sky. Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. If you zoom in, while the stars are beginning to streak at 25 seconds exposure, Jupiter is still round in shape, meaning because it is local to our solar system, it moves independently relative to the rest of the universe (from Earth's perspective). I also noticed something I have not noticed before and that is the amazing multi-coloured-ness of the stars!

I have included the original as a comparism and you can see, all I added was contrast and some saturation and straightened the horizon, with only ambient light from Shanklin and the stars illuminating the shot.

As a bonus, I have included a hand-held photograph I took of Jupiter the following night with the Nikon P510 (forerunner to the awesome P900) at 42x optical zoom and 2x digital zoom (84x equivalent)! The noise in the shot is a combination of atmospheric distortion, camera resolution, image pixelation and camera shake. Next time Jupiter is visible and it is a clear night, I will try the shot again using a sturdy tripod.

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More good stuff coming soon :)

Matt Blythe