I shot this with my Tamron SP 500mm lens earlier this evening. With a bit of noise reduction in Lightroom, you can make out 4 of the moons.

I arrived in Jupiter, Florida earlier today. This evening, there was a launch of a military communications satellite, known as WGS-9, from the Kennedy Space Center. My parents and I headed out onto the balcony in front of the place they’re renting to see if we could see it.

Happily, we could…

For those wondering about the technical details of the photos: Canon 70D, Tamron SP 500mm, 1/160s, f/8, ISO 12800.

It’s not quite as sharp as I’d like, probably due to the fact that the Moon was quite high in the sky, it was cold, and it’s tricky focusing the Tamron SP 500 when your hands are cold

I’m still playing with the 500mm lens I wrote about a few days ago and took these from my balcony this evening:

And with a bit of luck, I was able to capture Saturn, too:

Saturn required a bit of processing to remove the sensor noise and clean things up a bit. But, I’m still very impressed that you can make out the planet and the gaps of the rings around it.

I’m thinking about buying a Tamron SP 500mm lens from a friend, so he’s let me borrow it for a few days to try it out. It’s a manual focus lens and appears to be a fixed aperture (or I need to RTFM), so shutter speed and ISO speed are the things you play with to get the right exposure.
I set up my tripod on the balcony and aimed it at the moon. Other than cropping and some light processing using Lightroom Mobile on my iPhone, these are pretty impressive. 

One of the appealing things about the lens is that it’s roughly the same length as my 18-200mm at its shortest length. The lens is more like a little telescope than a traditional telephoto lens because it has a configuration of glass and mirrors that’s used in compound telescopes, aka a catadioptric lens. 

The bokeh (the blur of things outside the in-focus range) is pretty cool. Instead of the traditional “dots” you end up with “rings”. 

The photo I posted earlier is a bit small. I downloaded the photo directly from my camera to my iPad and I think it lost some quality in the process. I’ve reprocessed it and some of the other photos to see what I could find.

This is one of the better photos I took:

Inside the circle is a tiny dot that is the planet Mercury. You can click the image to see a larger version.

I managed to take this photo by using my 18-200mm lens fully zoomed, holding a piece of #14 welder’s glass in front of the lens and experimenting with the exposure until I found a combination of shutter speed and f-stop that wasn’t massively overexposed. No tripods, no telescopes, just handheld while sitting on a bench in front of the building I work in. I’m sure this looked very odd to the people walking past, but who cares? They didn’t end up with a picture of Mercury transiting the Sun.