Nightscapades
Active Member
Our solar system’s most massive planet, Jupiter, was slipping towards the western horizon when I captured this scene at around 12:30 am on July 14 of this year. There was a stiff breeze blowing across the top of this man-made pond, causing the water to be anything but smooth, and so diffusing the reflection of Jupiter’s light. That light had travelled across close to 737 million km (458 million mi) of space to reach the pond’s shimmering surface before bouncing the few metres up to my camera.
As well as being the most massive planet, Jupiter holds a few other records. At the time of writing, Jupiter is known to have 79 moons orbiting it. The magnetic field of this “gas giant” planet is the strongest of any of the Sun's satellites, at about 14 times that of the Earth’s. A day on Jupiter (the time it takes to rotate once on its axis) is only 10 hours long, and this high rotational speed causes Jupiter to bulge slightly at its equator.
Dwarfing Jupiter in size, magnetic field, brightness and every other aspect is the central band and galactic core of our Milky Way galaxy, owning the top 1/3 of my photo. The sky was exceptionally clear and dark on this night, enabling me to capture lots of fine details in the wisps and filigrees of the Milky Way’s “dust lanes”. Mars was part of the show, too, up at the top of the photo.
This photo is a cropped version of a taller image created from nine overlapping frames. I shot each of those individual photos with a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, exposed for 15 seconds @ ISO 6400. I used a Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head, tipped on its side, to take the nine photos with enough overlap between them to create a smoothly stitched vertical panorama.
