F70EXR -- Jupiter and its FOUR Galilean Moons! RETRACTION

I really cannot believe what I was able to photograph with the diminutive F70EXR. It blows my f-cking mind.

RETRACTION: There's a reason for that ... the image I billed as being from the F70EXR was actually the last of my D300 images in that series, the first F70EXR image fell next in line and I was fooled somehow.

My humblest apologies to anyone who was fooled.

I received a slightly patronizing email from a fellow who asked me why my Jupiter shots did not show moons?

Edit: I deserve an even stronger one now :-)

He was apparently able to see three moons with his Panasonic set at 100 ISO etc. Hmm, I thought, exactly why can't I? After all, Galileo discovered the moons using a telescope that any decent pair of binoculars today can run rings around ...

So I set out to figure out how to do it. First, I grabbed the D300 and 70-300VR and shot a bunch of frames until I could see the moons. It turned out to be impossible to resolve them at hand held speeds until sensitivity was turned up to 3200 ISO.

Edit: So far, the best I can do is to resolve the two moons on the right as one blob. The others were too close to the planet to resolve.

Why hand held speeds? Because the tiny sensor in the F70EXR quickly gets overwhelmed by noise during long exposures. It's kind of ugly. I proved that later by shooting a bunch of horrid frames :-)

Anyway, the magical frame happened to be my very first frame at 3200 ISO. The frames at 6400 ISO were overwhelmed by noise, and the frames at 1600 ISO showed no moons. Here's that first frame blown way up ... the four moons are clearly visible.


But here is the real treat ...

The rest is removed as it is crap. Again, I apologize for my misunderstanding. This does not, in any way, cast doubt on the moon image the other night. That remarkable image really came from this camera :-) ... and so have all the high ISO images I have posted. It remains an excellent camera with a few flaws ... and apparently it does not do miracles :-)