Could call this one "Jupiter Surprise!", because I really didn't expect to get this result at all.

On the right is Jupiter with three of its largest moons nicely grouped together. The moons are most likely Ganymede and Callisto, the two largest, and either Io or Europa. The lonely dot on the left is ιCap, the ninth star in Capricorn.

I was really just taking a couple of snapshots of the Moon and the planet close together in the sky (this was on September 29th), and it was only on impulse that I decided to aim the camera straight at Jupiter.

I can only imagine Galileo's surprise when he aimed his first telescope at Jupiter and was the first human being ever to see those same moons with his own eyes. I'm almost as amazed that it's possible to take a picture like this of another world with an ordinary camera.

The equipment I used was my Nikon D40x and a 300mm Tamron telezoom lens. The original picture was 10 megapixels in size, and this is a 1:1 crop from the center (so that one pixel here is one pixel on the original).