It’s a interesting to realise that anybody with a smart phone can now photograph our gas giant, Jupiter, located over 865,000,000 km away. You’ll need some better optics to get the moons of Jupiter, but it’s still very impressive that light emitted by the Sun bounced off the planet and traveled space all the way to the small 2mm opening of the lens and sensor on the phone to record a photo.

You’ll have to set the photo app into manual focus and use the “pro” setting to set the ISO and exposure, as the full automatic won’t be able to deal with such small light points in a dark background. But even hand held the results are good, thanks to keeping the exposure above 1/60s.

Below are photos of the Venus and Jupiter in early March taken with nothing more than a Samsung S10. If it wasn’t for Venus being so bright, correctly getting Jupiter would be a greater challenge.