Mike Salway took the picture almost two years ago. Checking out how exquisite it is, we easily understand how much time Mike spent on it.

He wrote us:

In the From the Vault series, I feature an older image which hasn't been seen on my site before and I talk about the capture and processing and hopefully highlight why this image is special to me.

The feature image in From the Vault this week is a portrait of *Jupiter and the Galilean Moons*, the Jovian system in high resolution. Captured on May 11th 2007, this was one of my most ambitious projects of that year, and took hours to capture and many many more hours in processing. It shows Jupiter with her 4 Galilean moons, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede and Io all at the same scale, in their correct positions at the time of capture.

It's a good time for this image to be featured again, in the International Year of Astronomy - 400 years since Galileo first used a telescope to observe Jupiter's Moons.

I took 6 images to create an animation, showing the rotation of Jupiter and the dance of Jupiter's Moons as they orbit the gas giant.

Please click the link to read more about the capture and processing of this image, and to see the 6-frame animation.

Visit his webpage Jupiter and the Galilean Moons for complete info on this.

Thank you Mike! Great job as always!