Night Sky Photography -- 08-08-2023 -- Last Quarter Moon & Jupiter with Galilean Moons

This afternoon and early evening we had some more of those hit-and-run thunderstorms that our little corner of Dixie is famous for in the summer months, as well as cloud cover, which thankfully cleared up just after midnight.

I was up kinda late and was able to capture some outstanding late night photos of the Last Quarter Moon in the night sky, along with the planet Jupiter and its four largest moons about 90 minutes after moonrise in the eastern sky.

As you can see from my first photo, the position of the Last Quarter moon with the Earth's shadow across the half of the beautiful Lunar surface is almost perfectly in line with the position of Jupiter just below and to the right of our view here on Earth. In the second close-up photos you can see the details of our lovely Luna's surface evenly covered by the Earth's shadow across the face of the Man-In-The-Moon.

In my third and fourth close-up photos, y'all can make out the bright planet Jupiter and its four famous Galilean (Jovian) satellites: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto; all of them just below Luna with the heavenly bodies separated at about 2 degrees (or about three full moon widths) apart. 

The the present time Jupiter is currently 444.8 million miles (about 722.4 million kilometers, or 4.8 AUs) from Earth, with the light from both the gas giant planet and its moons taking about 40 minutes to reach us here on the Earth's surface.

With my final four shots of the evening I captured some beautiful wide shots with the Last Quarter Moon and Jupiter with the fast-moving clouds moving past them overhead. Overall, a really good series of photos for the evening (or early morning depending on how y'all look at it). I truly hope y'all enjoyed them as much as I enjoy presenting them to y'all.