Photographed Jupiter back on March 9th in my back yard with a phone duct taped to a telescope. I had been trying to take a photo of jupiter with some visible details for a while now. I tried to take some shots with a dslr, but even with a telephoto lens it was still a small white speck. Attaching the dslr to my telescope proved futile, as the flange distance was too great and wouldn't allow for infinity focus (On a tangent, I realized it is a similar problem to what my eye experience, and it why I wear glasses.) Previous attempts at photographing Jupiter with my phone/telescope combo were plagued by a lack a of manual controls and having to rely on auto-exposure. Jupiter is very bright in the night sky, but the phones auto-exposure tries to correctly expose for detail in the majority of the scene, with is pitch black sky. Jupiter would in this case always end up extremely over exposed, even when exposure compensation was set to under expose by 3 stops.

On this night I was going to attempt to photograph the Orion Nebula, which is much fainter. However on that night the nebula was obscured by wispy clouds, and I could not locate fit by eye. I decided to point my telescope back at the redly visible Jupiter in what I though would be another futile attempt to photograph it. To my surprise, the presence of the clouds that night actually aided the process. The clouds diffused the light of Jupiter, simultaneously dimming the planet while lightening the overall scene. While this did decease the sharpness and contrast of the image, I was able to take a hazy photo of Jupiter in which you can make out the bands of different colored gasses in upper atmosphere. Success!