Sunday, September 26, 2010

Jupiter and Uranus

I was up in Flagstaff on Friday night and decided to visit Lowell Observatory. Near the top of Mars Hill is a little pullout where you can stop and look down at Flagstaff. I snapped a pic of the Moon and Jupiter rising over the city.


A little later in the evening, I slapped the 250mm zoom lens on my camera to try a close up of Jupiter. Although it won't win any awards, it was interesting.

You can see the four Galilean Moons...one is almost caught in the glare on the left side of Jupiter. Look to the upper left of Jupiter and you see a little blue disk. That is the planet Uranus which is very close to Jupiter right now. If you look at Jupiter in binoculars, you should be able to pick out Uranus pretty easily. And if you have a camera with a good zoom, you can try taking a picture of them!

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.

5 comments:

OrbsCorbs said...

Wow. That pic with the moons and Uranus is impressive.

kkdither said...

I think orbs is just pleased with himself for constructing a coherent sentence that contained the words moons and Uranus.

Seriously, hale... those are cool.

drewzepmeister said...

Something tells me that I should have seen that comment coming. Anyways, I'll on the lookout for this planetary display.

hale-bopp said...

Even on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the NPR show where you expect higher levels of humor, just saying the word "Uranus" gets a big snicker from the audience.

OKIE said...

We tried to see the moons the other night but unfortunately our binoculars just weren't good enough. Thank goodness you are here for us Hale.