The Snow Moon and Jupiter

On Tuesday (February 3, 2015), the Snow Moon (full moon in February) appeared to be best buds with Jupiter throughout the entire night.  They were within about 4.5 degrees of each other.  What does that mean?  If you hold your fist out at arm's length, 4.5 degrees would be a little less than half of your clenched fist.

New England has been experiencing a lot of snow and clouds in the last couple weeks, so we were lucky to have clear skies Tuesday night.  Getting photographs of the moon and Jupiter wasn't too difficult.  I was able to just step outside with a tripod and take some shots using a 75-300mm zoom lens and an 18-55 zoom lens.  The only two challenges were getting the moon into focus and getting the exposure correct.  You have to manually focus onto the moon, which requires a bit of finesse.  For the exposure, a full moon is so bright that the shot needs to be very quick, while Jupiter needs a longer exposure to gather enough light from the planet to be visible in the photograph.

I came up with three resulting images that I liked.  First, a wide angle view with trees in the foreground so that it'd be more interesting and also obvious on what you're looking at -- I intentionally over-exposed the shot for the moon as I really liked the star-like effect the moon gave off that way, and it was the only way for Jupiter to be visible at such a wide angle; second, a closer shot of just Jupiter and the moon; finally, a close-up photo of the Snow Moon.

@18mm

@135mm

@300mm