Photographing planets

Your advice please.
Have any of you tried photographing planets?

This is a shot of Jupiter with 4 moons, Io, Ganymede, Calista and Europa.
Taken with a 70-300mm lens, at 300mm at 5 o'gods this morning.

I'm going to have another go tomorrow, but reduce the exposure time a fraction, to see if I can get less *burn* and more detail.

Any suggestions that don't include *get a longer lens* would be appreciated (I work for the council, can't afford too many luxuries, too often)

Hi Gaz, you will definitely need to manual expose and take this about two stops down from the above shot, maybe more (I can't see EXIF).

I would guess you will need to shoot about: f6.3 - f9.0 @ 1/160 sec, iso400. But take plenty of different exposure shots.

Thanks. The whole thing is a little moot at the moment...the only thing I'd have got, had I gone out early in the morning since that shot, is wet...