The Moon and Jupiter

All week I have been trying to bag this photo but every time I have taken out the tripod the scene clouded over. Right now the moon and the planet Jupiter are relatively close to one another in the night sky. Best of all was last Tuesday when they were all but touching and with each passing night the gap is widening again.

The moon is of course a mere 238000 miles (380800km) from the Earth while Jupiter is 486 million miles (778 million km) away. Jupiter is the 5th planet from the Sun and 318 times the size of our Earth. Indeed Jupiter is so huge that it is 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets added together. Don't book your holidays there anytime soon though, it's mostly gas.

Ps. I should point out that the relative brightness levels of these two heavenly bodies is such that you would not expect to record them both successfully on a single frame. This is in fact a composite. 1/500th @f11 for the moon and 1/8th @f11 for Jupiter. The Jupiter layer placed on top and the blending mode changed to "lighten"