This photograph was taken by Mark Deprest on on the morning of August 5, 2001 at 08:00 UT. It shows Jupiter & the Galilean moons (top to bottom Callisto, Ganymede, Io and Europa) and Venus. Of the four Galilean moons, Io is the closest to Jupiter; In this photo, Io looks like a bump on Jupiter’s disk. The photo was taken using Mark’s Pentax 35mm manual camera and prime focus through his 5” f/5 homebuilt Jaegers refractor. This was a two minute exposure with Fujicolor 400 Superia film.
The Two Brightest Planets appear only 1.3 degrees apart from our point of view, but are really some 708,000,000 km away from each other. The bright star below Jupiter is Mu Geminorum and is 2.9 magnitude, the bright star above Venus is Eta Geminorum and is 3.3 magnitude.