Congratulations! I found the first time I looked at Jupiter the moons seem surprisingly far away from the planet. standingwave’s images show that off nicely. The flattening is also neat to notice.
See if you can find it again tonight - it will progressively move through the sky and you’ll notice the shift in the moons.
If your son is a Percy Jackson fan, move your eyes from Jupiter further up into the sky and you should see a large square with stars at the corners. That’s the great square of Pegasus.
It’ll help if you can find a short wall or something to rest your elbows on. Failing that, bring your arms forward and rest your elbows on your chest/stomach; it’s a bit more awkward, but it does steady your hands a lot. That’s what I do when I’m using my video camera; really cuts down on the shaking.
And once you’ve found the great square, look here: http://i56.tinypic.com/i26e0g.png. Follow the stars to the fuzzy patch I’ve pointed to with the red arrow. In dark skies, it’s a naked eye object but great in binoculars. That’s M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, at 2.5 million light-years distance it’s generally considered the farthest object one can see with the naked eye.
And what’s incredible about the Andromeda galaxy is its size. Most of it is not visible to the naked eye. See the following link which shows the Andromeda galaxy compared to our Moon: http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0606.html
I wouldn’t even say you need exceptional vision - if the sky is clear and it’s dark you can easily see the four biggest moons. They are pretty distinct.
You don’t even need a telescope, a good spotting scope with enough magnification will do. I used my dad’s (60x magnification, iirc), and i was able to see both the clouds of jupiter and the ring around saturn with it. You just need a good tripod. If you are a hunter or know one, that might a fun idea.
I still want to hook up my canon to a telescope and take a few awesome pictures of the sky… might have to look into that.
Are you two on the same wavelength? You think it’s not exceptional to see them with the naked eye?!
If that’s so, why were they unknown (by any name) before Galileo observed them through his, the world’s first, telescope? (and even then, he had trouble at first discerning them from one another)
Seeing the four largest moons of Jupiter with the naked eye is probably impossible and any claim otherwise should be met with a very loud, clear, “cite”! Here’s a nice little Sky & Telescope article basically saying it’s not possible.
Also, Jupiter just made its closest approach to Earth for some time a month or so ago, closest it’ll be until 2022. So even now, it’s still right in there, relatively speaking.
And thanks to standingwave’s map, I finally saw Andromeda. I’d been trying to locate it off of Cassiopeia for a while and just never could find it. Nailed it right off going off Pegasus.
My only tip to offer for binocular astronomy is that I have to stand right up against a tree or the side of the house in order to keep the binoculars steady enough to see anything. It’s amazing how much we move, even when we think we’re keeping still! The only thing that works for me is to lean them against something solid.
I love the “Pocket Universe” app for the iPhone as well.
They would be bright enough to see on their own, if they weren’t right next to something as overwhelmingly bright as Jupiter. On a crystal-clear night, from a high elevation, with some sort of masking, I wouldn’t rule it out. But it’d be tricky.
I think the confusion might be that in hiding is talking about seeing them in a spotting scope, not a “real telescope”. But a spotting scope is a real telescope (as, for that matter, is a pair of binoculars).
I use a 20X60 spotting scope with a 13° field of view. The nice thing about it is that it doesn’t invert the image like a refractor scope. Like others have said, I first thought Jupiter’s moons were a lens aberration, but they do change enough to rule that out.
It would be more accurate to say that your cite claims this is indeed possible, though difficult enough that claims should be regarded skeptically.
Here’s an article that describes how to see Ganymede and Callisto by using an object to block out Jupiter (which seems to get around the requirement for exceptional vision).
