Moon-Jupiter Appulse

On Jan. 21, the moon and Jupiter were less than 1 degree apart as seen from my back yard, so I took up the challenge of getting a photo of the pair with enough resolution and exposure depth to see the Jovian moons. Of course the difference in brightness is too great for a single shot, so I ended up compositing shots taken at very different exposures.

This photo is a composite of shots taken at ISO 400 and 6400, both exposures at 1/500s using a Borg 100ED / 1.04x field flattener / Nikon D600. Since the seeing was not so good at the time of minimum separation, I waited an hour.  By that time, Europa had finished transiting Jupiter so all 4 Galilean moons were visible against the sky. See the full res version or the full res version with Jovian moons labeled.