If you've been watching the skies lately, you've noticed that the Moon has been swinging closer and closer to a mysterious planet low in the sky. Now thanks to heavens-above.com the planet is no longer a mystery! It's Jupiter! 木星！

As you can see, the Moon and Jupiter are right next to each other tonight. Taking this prime opportunity, I whipped out my camera, set up the tripod on a stool on a chair on the balcony, and took some photos on various zoom levels at various aperture and exposure settings. Here's a photo illustrating the distance between the two objects, overexposed to get Jupiter two show up (it's very clear to the naked eye, though):

Obviously the moon is way, way overexposed, so I closed the aperture a bit and shortened the exposure time.

Back to a longer exposure time, I zoom in on Jupiter. Originally I had thought it might be Mars, but who could mistake the deep sky-blue color for Mars' red surface???

Lengthening the exposure time even further to probe for details, I captured all four of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, and Io! Nice!

That's all for tonight. It's a pretty good capture considering the warm Shanghai atmosphere, the Zhangjiang High-Tech light pollution, and my shaky little tripod.