D300 and 70-300VR -- Hand Held -- Jupiter and 4 Galilean Moons

After the disaster I had when trying to shoot the Galilean moons with the F70EXR, I thought I'd give it one more go with the D300 to get an even clearer image. Tonight's moons looked good for separation right at the time I shot:


So I sat for a few minutes with the 70-300VR dialed to max, which is the equivalent of 450mm on a full frame camera after the sensor crop is accounted for. Since a 50mm focal length is about equivalent to our vision, that makes this about 9x magnification. A little less than the standard binoculars used for astronomy. But more than enough to resolve the moons.

So ... I took a dozen frames or so and got excellent visibility of all four moons on several. This is the final frame of the night ... it looked so good on the LCD that I didn't feel the need for any more images.


That is a perfect match ... awesome. Hand held ... just me and my cam.

For those who are interested in the exposure data (and who, for some reason, have not yet heard of the OPANDA EXIF plugins for Firefox and IE), I shot these at 3200 ISO. I stopped the lens down to F8 this time, which improves sharpness at 300mm. I shot at 1/20s, which I felt was about as slow as I could go with the field of view set at 450mm ... since 1/450s is the correct hand held exposure without stabilization, I did pretty well ... almost 5 stops.