Jupiter Question

Damomanye

hey all,
A quick question from a complete newbie to the whole Astronomey thing. Im currently looking at Jupiter off te the south East through some mag x36 binocs.

Now the thing is, according to a sky chart i have, there should be no other starts around it, yet when i look at Jupiter , there is four stars that i can see near it. ( one to the top right , two extreemly close on the bottom left, and one further small but further to the bottom left.

What are these little stars?

Very interesting
Damo

-Al-

its moons?

Damomanye

i was thinking that, but im no good at this stuff.

Jupiter looks very nice.

-Al-

ya im the same I wouldn't be too sure myself i just remember years ago looking at jupiter with some auto focusing binoculars and seeing a few of its moons.

These clear skies are great though - calling the telescope out of retirement

Damomanye

Just found this on Wikipedia,

All four Galilean moons are bright enough that they could, if they were farther away from Jupiter, be sighted without a telescope. They have apparent magnitudes between 4.5 and 5.2 when Jupiter is in opposition with the Sun, and about one unit of magnitude higher when Jupiter is in conjunction. The main difficulty in observing them is due to the fact that they are located very close to Jupiter, and are masked by its brightness.

Im a fascinated newbie to all this.

Dr Pepper

The four 'Galilean' moons of Jupiter are Io, Castillo, Europa and Ganymede. These can be easily seen with a pair of binos. There are approx 65 moons around Jupiter in total!

The following is a very handy website for identifying the moons that you see when observing planets. (Click 'Planet Viewer', click Jupiter and fill in your observation time/location and other details* and click 'Render Diagram'. Select the JPEG download at the bottom for a larger image)

http://pds-rings.seti.org/tools/

* Here are some tips for entering the details:
- Observation time: 2007-JUN-11 00:01:00.00 (in that format)
- Field of View: Try 1200 arc seconds initally.
- Viewpoint: Lat: 53 Lon: 6 WEST Alt: 100(m). (approx for Dublin)
- Don't bother changing other settings unless you know what they are!

Here is a picture generated from the above site for the locations of the moons as observered from Dublin at 00:01 (1 min past midnight) last night. Bear in mind that the image you see through most scopes/binos is upside down and/or back-to-front so you may need to flip the image around to suit your instrument. (Seems to match your observations Damomanye )

Damomanye

Wow Cheers Dr. Pepper. Thats EXACTLY the way i saw them. Thats excellent.Im so happy now.

Damomanye

duplicate post , sorry

MooseJam

Where did you get x36 binocs are they just the zoom ones or are they big ass, what size lenses are they

Damomanye

€229 National Geographic ones in Argos. x36-108 porro Mega zoom. Got a Tripod with it.Weighs a nearly a KG.