In the summer of 1996, Jupiter came to opposition in central and eastern Sagittarius, just like it did in 1984, and like it would again in 2008 and 2020 (this pattern is the famous 12 year cycle). This photograph on slide film was taken somewhere on the Skyline Drive in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. As I recall, the weather around July 4 of 1996 was spectacular in Virginia, with clear, transparent skies and low humidity. This picture would have been tracked for at least 5 minutes, perhaps as long as 10, on the back of my Meade 2045 SCT. Unannotated image
Mouse over the thumbnail to see the image oriented with the horizon level, which is the way the scene would have looked ~ but I used to track the motion of the sky by having the camera piggybacked on my tele- scope so it was always oriented with the lines of right ascension and declination instead of altitude and azimuth.