drops of jupiter

Space has always been one of those things that I ponder about often, but tend not to consciously acknowledge. It's easy to walk outside, gaze around and take in the sprinkling of stars above your head, but when it's captured with incredible zoom inside the lens of a telescope, it seems so much more realistic.

A couple of friends and I took a drive out to a little area outside the busy city of Orlando and set up shop, taking photos and pointing big barrels of metal and glass at the sky. Protip: light pollution is the worst and will mercilessly mess up your long exposure shots (as evidenced below).

Jupiter is actually a lot more visible than I ever thought. With the naked eye, it seems like it's just a particularly bright star, but through a telescope you can actually see the textbook definition: a striped circle with 4 floating dots around it (that's the textbook definition... right? By the way- the dots are the moons)

Our moon is also an incredibly bright little guy! I was surprised to see just how lit up it was in comparison to the stars we looked at.

Another thing we encountered was a lot of clouds, which was a pain in the half to deal with... along with the creepazoid fog that rolled in shortly after we arrived (and left about 20 minutes later). I assume clear skies would have made for better pictures, but to be fair we did get a lot of awesome frames.

All in all, it was a truly mind-blowing experience! (I didn't take these next few, but thought I'd include it for the "full experience." Thanks to Jacob and Corey for taking these/putting them together!

Jupiter and its moons. HOW. COOL.

PS: For nostalgia's sake, no Venus didn't blow my mind. But it was everything I wanted to find.

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