Galilean Satellites

Date: 11/03/08
Time: 5:45-6:30pm CST
Weather: Partly Cloudy with 5-10 mph winds - Temp: 56 (F)

Location: Port Barrington, IL

This was the placement of Jupiter's Galilean Moons on the evening of November 3rd, 2008. The four moons were discovered sometime between 1609 and 1610 by Galileo using a primitive telescope. The moons pictured above are as follows (as seen through the eyepiece left to right): Ganymede, Europa, then the planet Jupiter followed by Io and Callisto. This image was taken using a 10mm eyepiece. There was some manipulation of the image including stacking to bring out the brightness of the satellites. Though it is difficult, hopefully you can make out the moons in this image. They were visible on the source file but have become more elusive once imported into blog interface. In future notes, I will offer better images with less light pollution which may have been a contributing factor.

From multiple nightly observations, you can tell that not only does Jupiter rotate but the moons move very actively around the giant planet and can even cause eclipses and shadows on a regular basis. A great tool is http://www.shallowsky.com/jupiter.html which allows you to enter your viewing time into a basic interface and observe the moon placements at any given time. In all, Jupiter has 63 moons.

Some info provided by Wikipedia