All winter long the wonderful planet Saturn with its breathtaking ring system and its swarm of moons has been adorning the Washington night sky. This month though brings a changing of the planet guard. As Saturn starts out the evenings lower and lower in the western sky beside Gemini and Orion and what’s left of the winter constellations, Jupiter takes the celestial stage in the low eastern sky.
Jupiter’s by far the largest planet in our solar system, and similar to our sun. It’s basically a big ball of hydrogen gas. At 409 million miles away, it’s the closet the colossal planet will be to the Earth this year.
Astronomically, this is called opposition, and it occurs with Jupiter and the Earth every 398 days when the Earth is in a line between Jupiter and the sun. Because of this, Jupiter and the sun are not only at their minimum distance from each other, but Jupiter is also visible all night long. Just like the full moon, Jupiter rises at sunset in the east and sets at sunrise in the west.
As soon as you can, look for what appears to be a really bright star rising above the southeast horizon. That bright light is actually the planet Jupiter. There should be no mistaking Jupiter for anything else. Excluding the moon, Jupiter is by far the brightest celestial object in the evening sky.
Unfortunately, to get the best view of Jupiter through a telescope you’ll have to wait until almost 11 p.m. By then the king of the planets will be high enough in the sky to avoid the blurring haze of our atmosphere. After that you’ll able to see at least some Jupiter’s higher cloud bands of methane, ammonia, sulfur and other gases. They’ll be seen diagonally across the disk of planet with two distinctly darker bands either side of Jupiter’s equator.
If you can’t stay up that late, your view of Jupiter through the eyepiece of your scope will be definitely fuzzy, but you should see up to four of Jupiter’s brighter moons, known as the Galilean moons. They’re named in honor of Galileo, because in the year 1610 he was the first person, at least that we know of, that took the recently invented telescope and studied the night to night changing positions of little “stars” either side of Jupiter. He didn’t really know what the little stars were, but he concluded that whatever they were they were circling Jupiter. He concluded that since Jupiter had objects circling it, then our sun was orbited by Earth and the other planets. It was visual proof to Galileo that Nicholas Copernicus was right to conclude in the mid 1500s that the sun, and not the Earth, was the center of the known universe at the time.
Making that kind of statement was a politically dangerous thing to do then. The church, intertwined with the government, didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that the Earth was not center of the universe. Galileo was put under house arrest for making such a suggestion. He wasn’t officially forgiven by the Roman Catholic Church until 1992 by Pope John Paul II.
Jupiter will be part of night skies through most of this coming summer. Enjoy the king of the planets.
Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis and author of the new book “Washington Starwatch,” available at bookstores and on his Web site, www.lynchandthestars.com.
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