Jupiter is in opposition to the Sun right now, and we hauled out our little used telescope just for fun.
Totally worth it!
We saw Jupiter, and with our small telescope, we were able to at least two of its stripes, along with Io, Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, all in a line across it.
Go out around midnight, and look to the left of the Harvest Moon. It’s the brightest thing around there, and you won’t be disappointed!
In fact, see Jupiter any time. Any sort of optical assistance at all (even just cheap toy binoculars) is enough to catch the four Galilean moons, and you can also often see stripes and (if you look at the right time) the Great Red Spot.
My favorite thing, in my telescope-owning days, was when you could catch the shadow of one of the satellites on Jupiter–a tiny, barely visible black dot.
And if you look to the right and up, Uranus
Not really about this year’s opposition, but a very cool amateur video of last year, when when the shadow of Jupiter’s moon, Io passed in front of Ganymede:
[click the picture to see the video]
I couldn’t find it, or if I did, it didn’t look like much.
I have a standard, long-tubed telescope. Is it worth it to take it to the local school, with far less light pollution, and look for Uranus?
I will NOT be looking up Uranus.
Well no, it won’t look like much, but unless you’re suffering from really severe light pollution, you should be able to find it. Except under the worst conditions, you can find Uranus easily enough with binoculars.
With a good telescope, under good seeing conditions, you should just barely be able to resolve Uranus into a disk, and if you’re lucky spot a hint of blue-green color.
I don’t have a telescope and don’t want to buy one. Is there a place to go to look with a telescope?
Poking around, I see my local city college has an observatory open to the public certain days.
Lots of museums and observatories will let the public look through their telescopes. Near me the Boston Museum of Science and the MacAuliffe-Shepard Planetarium in Concord NH have telescopes that they often open to the public.
Also, if there’s an astronomy club in the area, you may be granted a look through theirs. I’ve done this in several places.
Some universities and colleges also.
UCLA does this at Boelter Hall, if you’re in the neighborhood. IIRC it’s Wednesday nights, or at least a couple of Wednesdays a month.
giggles like a fool
I could probably find Jupiter, but light pollution is just horrible around the high density areas of L.A. It seems that most of the apartment complexes have gone completely insane with outdoor lighting. The complex across the street has a couple of intense white floodlights that face our unit, and it’s like having the full moon in there, all the time.
They need to hurry up and rename that planet “Urectum”…
And invent the smelloscope.
I saw a bright reddish thing fairly near the fullish moon the other night. My first guess was either Venus or Mars. I had a moment of nerd joy when I whipped out my Android phone, fired up Google Sky Map, pointed it at the sky and discovered it was Jupiter.
The boys (at about 5 years old) asked what the wooden box was in the corner of the basement…it’s a cheap (CHEAP!) telescope my Wife picked up from a garage sale in high school.
I was flabbergasted to find you could pick out the features of Jupiter! I thought people actually used GOOD equipment to do so. We looked at the moon, we looked at the Brakes Plus on the Horizon…a good time was had by all after the one kid figured out that, if any part of him touched the telescope, it ruined what I was trying to show him.
I just went out and looked with a 20x spotting scope I have. Couldn’t see any stripes, probably because it’s a humid night, but I did see 4 bright sparks in a line - 3 to the left, 1 on the right. Were they the moons? Is there a website that shows where the moons are on a nightly basis?