Jupiter… and friend

Aug 12, 2008 by Jared Smith

Last night, in preparation for tonight’s astrophotography presentation, I set up the telescope for the first time in… well, way too long. The Perseid meteor show is peaking and I saw around 30 bright meteors. When I turned the telescope to Jupiter, I noticed the Great Red Spot moving across Jupiter’s surface. While the GRS can be seen 3 times per day, I had never seen it with my bear eyes. I quickly attached my CCD camera and captured some video. Jupiter is pretty low in the sky at this latitude, so the video was pretty fuzzy, but after processing it looked… alright. Nothing to write home about, but you can tell it’s Jupiter and can see the GRS.

After processing, I noticed the ‘dot’ above the top red band. I checked some software and realized that it is Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s 63 moons. Ganymede is about 1/3 the size of Earth and is bigger than the planet Mercury. This photo gives you some perspective of the size of massive Jupiter – 318 times bigger than Earth.