Last night Jupiter was in full view! To the naked eye, it looked like an extremely bright star sitting slightly under the Moon. I was looking at it through a telescope in my backyard and thought I was looking at Venus! but didn't understand why Venus had four other planets orbiting it. I came inside and googled. Duh. I was looking at Jupiter and it's four Galilean moons!! After doing some reading on Jupiter's moons, I was very excited to discover they have ice, water, rocks, volcanoes... a lot like another planet that has LIFE on it, Hmmm (EARTH.)
Keep in mind that, Jupiter, at it's furthest from Earth, is over 900 million miles away!! That's almost a billion miles. Well that's what scientist say, but I feel like it's closer than that because I can see it through a telecsope in my back yard! Amazing.
Here are the pictures I took of Jupiter. I held my Canon PowerShot SD880 IS to the lens of an Orion Explorer 90mm AZ #9029 Altazimuth Refracting Telescope. This is the same way I captured my pictures of the Moon. http://noelill.blogspot.com/2011/09/moon.html
The first photo is how I saw it through the telescope except I could see it's four moons as well. They didn't seem to show up in my photograph. The second picture is a close up of Jupiter and the final picture is over exposed, but you can see three of it's moons. I guess my camera lost one of them. They looked like stars in perfect orbit around the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter
