Accomplished astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy captured his 'sharpest Jupiter shot', as the planet comes the closest to Earth it has been for nearly 60 years.
“And while the number of photos seems like a lot, I was capturing them at about 80 per second, so it went by relatively fast. In all, it took about two hours to snap the photos,” he adds.
The conditions for the night of his Jupiter shoot were particularly good allowing incredible detail to be captured through McCarthy’s lens. However, there is an opportunity to get even clearer images of the “King of Planets” as today, September 26,, McCarthy says he will be “shooting it nightly for weeks, weather permitting.” But the peak is today as Earth finds itself in “opposition” to Jupiter. This is when Earth finds itself directly between the Sun and one of the other planets, which happens yearly, but 2022 is special because of a particularly close orbit.
At the farthest point in its orbit, Jupiter is 600 million miles away but currently it is a mere 367 million miles away. This means Jupiter now appears 11% larger and more than one and a half times brighter than it does when it is near aphelion . Even those with handheld binoculars should be able to make out Jupiter’s disk shape, thanks to the planet’s massive size. Astronomers with more powerful equipment should be rewarded with richly-detailed images, weather permitting.
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This jaw-dropping Jupiter photo is a photographer's sharpest ever and made of 600,000 imagesTariq is the Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001, first as an intern and staff writer, and later as an editor. He covers human spaceflight, exploration and space science, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Managing Editor in 2009 and Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. He is also an Eagle Scout (yes, he has the Space Exploration merit badge) and went to Space Camp four times as a kid and a fifth time as an adult. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter.
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