Sunday, September 6, 2009

Jupiter

Tonight Sam and I were watching the moon rise. It's almost a full moon and it was a beautiful orange/yellow color. Then I switched the telescope over to what I was assuming at that moment to be a planet. It's in the East-Southeastern sky right now. Once I focused in on the planet to my surprise I saw 4 moons! Quickly I not only let Sam view it but I also jumped on the Internet to try to figure out what we were looking at. It ends up that we were looking at Jupiter! The moons that we saw are as follows: the moon Callisto was to the east of Jupiter and the three moons to the west of Jupiter were Io, Europa and Ganymede. If our telescope was a stronger one we would also be able to see the red spot as it is currently facing Earth. I'm telling you now that if you have a telescope take advantage of this opportunity to see a planet along with other objects in the sky. If you have kids...let them look. You'll be amazed at how much they will want to learn more about everything "up there"!

The below image is not mine. I found it out Photobucket (you can click on the image to be taken to it's original site). This is pretty much what we saw except for the fact that to us Jupiter looked completely white. But it still was pretty cool to see.

4 comments:

D... said...

Oh wow, very cool! My family loves looking at the things in the sky. They'll be sorry they missed it. Maybe they can try tonight.

mamma b said...

How fun. My oldest loves that also. What telescope did you get? We must buy the cheap ones we don't ever see anything. Or it could be operator error!!

Anonymous said...

That is so cool! We need to get a telescope for David. I think if we got one, he would be using it as much as possible!

thais said...

OMG! this is so cool :) loved reading your blog... thx for coming by my blog

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