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The Night Sky Podcast | Moons Of Jupiter
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And this week, we’re going to be talking about the things happening above us in the sky for the, I guess, 23rd 22nd of April. It’s almost the end of April, right? That’s like, we’re in now. I was looking at some of the events that are going on, and then we’re kind of going to dig into a couple of things about the planets that you can see right now. That’d be fun to talk about. It’s gonna be cool. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. And we’ve done a lot this last week, too. Yeah. Yeah, which is, which is definitely the way to go. We got to do more, more observation stuff as much as we can. This is this is the season for us. That that becomes the most possible, especially here in Oregon, and in the Willamette Valley in the winter. And this winter, I think it’s been an El Nino year, they say, but you know, there’s been some nice days too. It’s nice, a lot of waves of clouds. So mostly stormy. Yeah. November, December, January, February, and I’d say March, are all months where there’s really consistent cloud cover, and there’s a very slim chance that you’ll be able to have a continued amount of good observational viewing nights for stars or, or for astronomical events or going on like in the mornings. We rarely, I think, had a day to do observations of the five planets being up at the beginning of February. Yeah,
there really wasn’t a good opportunity for it here. There are a lot of clouds.
Yeah, a lot of clouds. Yeah. And so we were able to see I, you know, a few things a couple times, but I think, yeah, this is the time of year for us in the middle of April, as the weather starts to break for us, as we kind of start moving into may and even is really stuck at the end of April and into May, there’s a good chance, we’re gonna have a lot of days that are a little bit mixed. Even right now, we’re dealing with a little bit of mixed weather, whereas this afternoon, it was nice and sunny. We have a thunderstorm passing through. Yeah, so I mean, really, yeah, it was it was cool. So there’s, there’s a lot of change going on atmosphere or you know, atmospherically weather wise for us. But it’s finally the time of year where we’re gonna get some good observation nights. And it’s a lot of fun to because it starts getting dry enough and warm enough, you know, nice enough out at night that we can jump out and, and do a couple things that take a little bit more time outside what I want to do really bad. So I want to get out to a spot that has some dark sky like a place that’s that’s pretty far away from a lot of civilization stuff. And we should try a few of the things that we did the other the other night, and we should do some stuff with with our cameras, like photographically, we should try and take some pictures of the Milky Way or you know, some some wider expanses of a place. I think that’d be really cool. I’d really trying to, yeah, we should try and do some of the photographs that we see of like that rich, Milky Way look that we that we can pick up, be a lot of fun to try, especially in a spot as like a really good dark sky up on the Steen’s is great or just really anywhere in Eastern Oregon. You can you can get a really good spot. It’s away from town, and that, you know, can be 100 miles away from another small town. You know, that’s the next place you can see light from.
Yeah, I think that some Eastern Oregon observations would be really good.
Yeah. And to try, you know, it’d be cool, especially right now, just because Jupiter is so bright and so high, and then also the summer. With Mars being so bright, it’s going to be it’s going to be pretty neat. But you can you can see a shadow cast we talked about last time you can see a shadow cast by those big planets. And it’s really cool that you can you can tell that you can kind of see it a cast shadow on the ground if it’s really dark out. And you can kind of make your way or you can see by starlight sort of what you noticing. So it’s pretty strange to see but Jupiter’s real bright right now. And it was cool to see there’s a lot of planets stuff going on. That’s probably what we’re going to talk about through the podcast is is mercury just the other day had its greatest elongation we had talked about that. When we were talking about mercury making its its transit into the evening sky for the good part of April. And so we’ve been able to see that in the evenings. I guess a little bit lower than like, looks lower than Capella. It’s it’s cool because in the evening we sat the other our last week when we were driving back from from Woodburn we could look out to the western horizon and you can see mercury really quite far to the north us guys surprise because he in January and this is sort of that system of the tropics that we have like Tropic of Capricorn Tropic of Cancer, and that the rock the rotation that the earth does to create the different seasons. So in the winter when we were able to see mercury at the end of December, I think the beginning of January I think we’re driving back from New Year’s from Portland we look out and down down deep into the South West you can see a point of light and that was mercury and the now as the daylight hours have gotten a lot later as we have late a lot or light a lot later into the evening. We’re able to look out and now the ecliptic line is going much further north. And that’s why the sunsets much further north. And that’s why we have much later evenings of our much later sunsets in the evening. And then we goes up to the solstice and then kind of starts to cast back down, but that ecliptic line that follows that that seasonal progression to the sun also. And so that’s why right now we have Mercury, that setting really far to the north kind of will mean unusually, but it just kind of cool to see it for this long and at a position of greatest elongation, when it’s setting this far to the north. So I think that means it sets pretty late into the evening. But it’s cool to see, it’s been fun, there’s been a couple nights that we’ve been able to see it pretty well. And I think we’ll have maybe another week or so to get that best period of observations, but it’s made it to its top point, and then now it’s starting to come back down cycle come back down toward the horizon or back down toward the sun. It’s interesting out cycles like that are having elliptic ecliptic shape. Yeah, it’s, it’s cool. It’s interesting, how does that I don’t, I don’t really understand all the Mercury’s movements, there’s like a different different sets of cycles for each of the planets, like when they’re predicted to shop in the evening versus the morning, or, you know, like when they’re going to be positioned for it. Now, it’s more scientifically determined about, you know, based on where the orbits are. But in the past, there have been all these, like these little systems and rhythms of like, you know, like, Venus has an eight year cycle of how many times to show up this many times in the evening, during this period of spring and this period of fall. That’s sort of a thing. And then, and then this many times, you know, in the morning, that sort of thing, it’s kind of figured out or it’s got this little, like clockwork pattern that it does. And so I think people have been kind of picking up on that for a couple 1000 years now. But it’s still interesting to see, you know, mercury, make these kind of interesting motions across the sky. But it’s cool. We’ve been able to observe mercury a few times over the last couple of weeks. And then the big one that we’ve been looking at a lot is, is Jupiter. We’ve been checking Jupiter a lot. It will because it’s cool. It’s up in Leo right now. And it’s just kind of straight up in the sky, things coming up to its senior point, which is the highest point in the sky. I think it’s called Zenith and a Nadir are the two terms. So when you look up at the highest point in the sky, that’s the zenith. And when you look at the lowest point, and that’s fear, that’s the Nadir.
Oh, interesting. I knew the zenith point. I don’t know if I was as familiar with NATO, though. I think
that’s what it is, is that as a myth? I didn’t realize this. But that’s like it’s progression from the horizon up to the highest point. And so what that is, and as the Asmath No, I don’t know either. But we’ve been looking at Jupiter, it’s high up in the sky. And it’s cool. We have a pretty simple telescope. But it’s
very simple. It’s my telescope from the 90s when I was a little kid,
and we’ve got it, we’ve got it. And it got to set up working well enough. Well, first thing we did is we looked at the moon and we were looking at the moon in a couple different phases of its cycle. Also, I think tonight is a full moon. It is Yeah, and it’s gonna be over close to Scorpio. Tonight. That’s cool. Jimmy cool to it’ll be in a couple star or a couple new york couple planets. We talk about that in a bit too. But we’ve been watching the progression of the moon over the last couple of nights. So the first couple nights that it was in front of or west of Jupiter in the sky. And then there’s a track back close to Jupiter and right up next to Jupiter just a couple of days ago, and then not past Jupiter, and now over by spiker and into Scorpio now, and it’s been cool to kind of watch the progression and then watch the phases of the moon as the moon gets brighter and brighter. And so we’ve been trying to do is use this telescope to make observations of the moon each night. And we were kind of looking at different things that we you know, we’re able to see. And it’s cool how you can examine the moon, once you have a telescope or once you have a real close view of it. The different things that you can see
is really interesting seeing seeing it in so much detail. There’s so many craters on it.
Yeah, so many craters. It’s difficult to see him, you know, from earth or you can detail in that way as like a real spherical object that you’re looking at. It’s difficult kind of sometimes. She says that pancaked, you know, circle look. Yeah, it’s just it’s just out there and exists but yeah, it was cool. So do you remember that first night when we were looking at the moon you can see out and then on that meridian line of the day nightline that’s where you can see that contrast and the craters that was there is Yeah, and it was cool because that’s where you get the most definition you can you can refine the most outside of that like once it gets into what would be high noon on the moon, or what would be just another really bright part of it. All the shadows are flattened out and you can’t you can’t resolve there’s really no definition in it anymore. Yeah, that’s really strange and and I remember learning that before that The best time to make observations of the moon is, is early on, or is early into the crater or in its Crescent period is a good time to take observations of the moon. And then as it kind of builds up, but during a full moon, it ends up being more complicated because it’s so bleached out, it’s like we’re looking straight down at the moon at high noon, like it would be light here on Earth at high noon, there’s no shadows, to give any contrast, except for shadows a point straight down, that sort of blur the contrast lines, you’d really want to find. So it ends up being you know, just not as useful, like we’re looking at when we look at the moon, we get that good. Contrast that feeling right at that day, night meridian light wherever the sunset of Earth is, for the view of the moon, which would be cool to see because it would last for a whole day, it would just be the earth at the edge, but there’s no atmosphere on the moon. So I guess it wouldn’t look too different. But it’s cool to check out the moon, you know, when we’re looking at the little craters. And then so as you check it, the next night, you see that the phases progressed, and that you can see and resolve new craters that are now or that were yesterday. shadowed in the dark side of the moon. Now they’ve been revealed in the lightest as the phases of the moon. Yeah, so it’s cool to kind of watch it move on.
Yeah, it’s been, it’s been really interesting. Seeing seeing changes along the line. It’s hard. Kinda like, you’re just saying that it’s, it’s hard to map it out, though. Or you have to kind of remember what the other ones are? Because you can’t see them.
Yeah. We have to Yeah, we have to kind of place a couple. Good. Well, it’s difficult understanding, first of all, the the telescope kind of twisting, upside down. So that’s the legislative to sort of reorient yourself to, but then it’s best when you can kind of like, map yourself to a couple of landmarks on the moon a couple shapes. And I think you can do that as you get more used to things are more used to the full moon, what you can’t, you know, if you’re looking at it in the face, you know, when we were looking at, we have this cool moon globe. And so it’s Yeah, glow like a globe of the earth, like an atlas of here or a little globe. You know, it kind of has the the resolution of the the pieces that are around the moon. It’s just like the dark side of the far side of the Moon that we don’t get to see. And we were like holding it up trying to figure out what part we were looking at, or like a weird angle. So we could kind of like identify the different pieces, or the different landmarks that we’re looking at. And it was just really difficult to do. We weren’t really sure.
Yeah, there’s so many craters on the moon. Well, yeah, there’s a ton of them as hard when you can see we align of them. Yeah, we were real accurate. But we found the shadows, pretty well, or the
Yeah, well, it’s tough. And we should take a look at it, you know, in the next night or two. And we should see some of the things that are revealed now that we can see and sort of look at the landmarks of like, Oh, well, we hadn’t this part, which we can name and find now that’s revealed in the light. But it was, you know, right around this section. So maybe, you know, maybe it was these two craters or you a business line, that sort of thing. But it’d be kind of fun. We should we should do more that that we should kind of watch. It’s been rushing and cool.
Yeah, it’s been really cool. Using the telescope more or just tracking it. Watching every night. Yeah, it was cool. See how it moves?
Yeah, I like doing that. We got to do that more. We got to pick up. We got to go to get a real scout. That’ll be it’ll be a little Kickstarter, a GoFundMe page for the night sky podcast, is support support. telescope, we really thought I’d want to get a camera attached for that Sunday, like we’ve been talking about, yeah, put the Yeah, put a put a digital SLR into that so that we can take photographs, because I think so I think if I understood, right, there’s a couple different types of telescopes, and we get a ton of it. But I think we’re using a rev fraktur telescope. And then there are reflector telescopes. I think reflector telescopes are the ones that are like the top sonian telescopes and Newtonian telescopes, where the light comes into the barrel, and then goes all the way down to the back end of the barrel, the floor and then bounces back up, and then hits an objective lens that focuses the light out to your eye so you can see it. Yeah, so that there’s that system of light collection because I’ve heard this before, too, is that a telescope job isn’t really to magnify you there as much. What it is, is to help you get a bigger aperture have an eye to collect more light for dim objects so you can get a better resolution of it when you look to it. It’s kind of interesting how that works. But I’ve heard that before.
Is that kind of the idea that the DOD sonian ones are based off of like how they’re designed?
Yeah, really it would be it would be really similar to that too is that that’s why they use those there’s really Uber Do you hear that? So much Thunder Whoa. So boom, go shut my and noise get on some time. It’s probably just pure silence. I don’t know who wrote the day, but it’s cool. We can hear thunder. I think it clicked in the microphone when the lightning bolt strike or the when I saw the light outside, there’s like little snap, little interference. Well, so yeah, we’re talking about telescopes. Yeah. So the job of the telescope is to collect as much light as possible. And that allows us to refine and get a better resolution. Kind of like what we were able to do when we looked at Jupiter. Finally, like when we get Jupiter, we have this little refractor telescope, it’s perhaps it’s the smallest line of telescope. So I think it’s a three and a half inch. It’s very small. And yeah, I think for refractors, you want to do more than four inches? I think is the idea. Yeah, that’s when you start getting a better resolution to be satisfying for amateur astronomy stuff. That’s when it gets more fun. But like we were able to see with ours, doing what we’re talking about, we could barely make out the bands of Jupiter. Yeah, that’s right. And but it’s still look really like a point, a point of light. And you can barely kind of make out that there was some texture, some contacts that we couldn’t really see like the storm or anything like that. That wasn’t visible for us. But we couldn’t make out the points of light that were the moons two, which is which is really the fun thing to observe about Jupiter, at least with the gear that we have is checking out the moons and the rotation and stuff. And so and we can see it’s really satisfying, because you can see night tonight tonight how quickly they change. Oh, yeah, that’s really interesting. It is really interesting. Yeah, that’s cool. You can see how quick it is, you know, or you can just kind of tell like, Well, yeah, these are really cool. And it’s cool. Yeah, it’s, it’s fun. It’s fun to get to observe it is really one of the most real things in space that you can just look out to that you’re not really aware. It’s just right out there happening and working around you all the time. And it’s cool. You get to kind of you know, just put a tool up and look at it and you get to see something that people I guess didn’t get to see for 1000s of years, but it’s pretty cool. I’ve heard though that you can see like Gainey, Mead, or with the naked eye, you can tell that there’s like a moon around Jupiter.
I had wanted. Yeah, I had wanted to bring that up because I was wondering, I’ve heard that you can’t.
But I’ve heard that there was there was a thought that Jupiter had like a little brother or like a little companion or something that would be with it wherever it was. So I don’t know. That’s true, but
I don’t know why there. It’s I think maybe I’ve just looked at it and telescope enough now. Yeah, I’m tricking myself. Yeah. But I swear sometimes it looks like there’s like a little extra twinkle around it. You know, it might be there’s like, look at how spot it prior? Yeah, we should. There’s lots
of things that people can do once once they figured out that something’s there. Like he can spot Venus in the daytime. Yeah, I had some periods, you know, but you can spot Venus in the day sometimes Really? Like you can see the moon in the day, if you know the right spot. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you can totally see them in the day pretty easily. Well, that’s easy. And then but Venus is difficult. And I guess there’s some periods, you can do it decently. And yeah, it’d be really strange. But it’s not something you would know to do. Or
Yeah, you have to kind of know to look in the spot.
It’s hard and seems like it’d be hard. But it’s cool, though, that you can do something like that. So. So there may be a chance that Yeah, we can see in our real dim six to seventh magnitude point of light around Jupiter. That would be like one of the moons or something like that. But there were real damn even in the telescope, the real small points of light. It’s really cool, though to see. See, they weren’t discovered until like 1610. That’s the date listed a discovery of the date of observation with with Galileo, and his telescope, his observations that he ended up publishing scientifically. But it’s cool, though, that, you know, we’re able to look at now with our telescope, check stuff out.
It’s really cool. Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of fun getting to see Jupiter for the first time when I was a kid and I use that telescope, I could only find Earth’s moon really, it’s hard to telescope, especially with it being mirrored and upside down.
Yeah, it is a little tough. There’s a lot of nicer tools. Now there’s little rockers that you can use as dials that flow, the fine tuning, we can kind of roll it on the gimbal across you can kind of track an X Y Z axis to sort of point yourself out on the grid and pretty comfortable way Yeah, it’s easier now are like follow moving things like Jupiter hats kind of tracking by or any of the stars was rolling away from
I think we got the chance last last year to use a telescope that was set up like that, where it was on a system where you’d you’d Uh, yeah, just Yeah, kind of
we looked at I think Jupiter and maybe the moon or something. Yeah, it was cool to do that. And it’s really comfortable. That seems like a lot easier than method. That’s everything I want to get. Yeah, if we were able to pick up a new telescope there’s there’s so many other Things like that. That’s the old technology now, you know, they have like the, the, you know, punch in the code and it will auto track to where it says the object supposed to be. It’ll hold with it. It’s kind of interesting. I’m not really that interested in that. I think that’s a gimmick, or Yeah, I like the idea of finding it. Yeah, I can do that. That’s what I’m for. Yeah. But it’s cool. If you don’t want to have to hassle with it too much. It’s a fun idea to just kind of set it and have a fight. It’s a it’s a pain to just kind of flow and like sort of float around back and forth to see if you can sweep for just a little point a light towel is Jupiter. It’s obvious when you look at Jupiter because it’s so much brighter, and it’s so bright right now. But it’s really cool. Yeah, getting to see the little little moons around it. So we’re going to talk a little bit about, about Jupiter, about Jupiter’s moons and sort of what you can see and what we’re able to see when we were checking out the telescope. So there’s the four moons that you can see, there’s Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. And those four moons make up 99% of the mass of moons around Jupiter. So almost all the way almost all the mass, the physical volume of moon around Jupiter is really in those four moons. But there are 67 listed moons around Jupiter. And so that means that really there’s like 1% of the mass of the moons is spread out between that other set of moves, which is a lot of change. It’s a lot. Yeah. And so I was kind of looking at that, because I was like what has really work. I mean, there’s really four moons, right? And then there’s a lot of small pieces. And that’s really the case 99% it’s like it’s a lot of it that isn’t there. And so I guess I was looking into that a little bit. So there’s a Foreman’s that were discovered in 1610. And then there were all the later moons that were discovered, I think the first ones were in it was like the 1830s, and then into like, 1904, and then up to 1977, there have been 16, moons total found. So I guess I didn’t Well, yeah, like another 12, on top of the four that we had. And it was a shoot, I think it was in 1977 at the Voyager one passed by Jupiter. And then took a lot of photographs. And that was the point that we had a point a point of reference photographs and the actual new data that was a lot closer to Jupiter. So that was what allowed astronomers to map and then find the new moons that they had added to the list after 1977. That’s how we moved from 16 moons in the year 1977. And then that bursting up to pass 2004 when they added more. And then now to the point, we have 67 moons around Jupiter, it’s a lot of extra stuff that’s been added over a short period of time. I remember looking at an astronomy book when I was a kid and it said that Jupiter at 16 minutes, I was like, Whoa, yeah, well, it’s like way more now that was in the 90s or something like that, you know, it had been up in the 50s, or whatever it was considered at the time. But I didn’t realize it, that they’re all really small objects, there’s really only a couple of the moons that have a planetary mass, I think is what it would be. But it’s that point where there’s enough mass for the body to pull itself into a round or a spherical shape, or a near spherical oblong shape. But, but a lot of these moves are really just like asteroids, or asteroids, really, you know, or they’re like clumps of stuff, they’re things that I haven’t been able to pull themselves down into round shapes. There’s a few objects that are relatively able to, but really not too many. So it’s cool. What we can see in the telescope is IO. Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto is a closest than Europa that’s so I always like the volcanic one as like a huge amount of tidal forces from Jupiter that’s keeping the surface of the planet really hot and molten, almost.
So there’s lots of volcanoes and stuff, then there’s Europa, it’s very different, a lot of water. And I think it’s a lot of frozen water, there’s thought that the title of friction from Jupiter like it affects IO. And keeping its surface hot, also keeps the near core or inner surface under the ice, hot or warm or with tidal friction from Jupiter. So it’s thought that there could be a liquid ocean on Europa that could support life if it was warm enough. But it’s kind of an interesting idea. That’s where there’s a lot of speculation on what kind of things could you know could exist or live in the world or outside of our world. And in our solar system. It’s kind of cool. So there’s I up i O. Then Europa, dice world. And then there’s gagne me. That’s the biggest moon in the solar system. It’s huge. It’s bigger than Mercury. There are a few that are bigger than your mercury. Callisto is almost the same size as mercury. I think Mercury is bigger, but it’s their sister size about the same though Yeah, I was really surprised that they About that, that there are moons that are that are larger than, than a planet that we can see.
Yeah. And there’s was it Titan from Saturn
is really big. We should, we should look at Saturn because you can see it now. So I think you can see five moons around Saturn. We should definitely check that. Yeah, we should definitely do that. I’d be really cool. I think it’d be a lot of fun to transplant, which is definitely Saturday and we can see the rings really well. That’d be really fun to do. But yeah, like around Jupiter. There’s Yeah, Ganymede, which is bigger than Mercury. There’s coal listo, which is also pretty big. I think bigger than I’m moon are about the same size as our moon. Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty interesting. That’s cool. But yeah. And then so yeah, I think those are the furthest out. So when we looked up at it, you can see it’s kind of a thing we look up You see, like, like, one, two, and then a third out on the left side. And then there’s one far out on the right side. And then the next night, you see to the left side, and then to on the right side. And you go Whoa, and that will move so fast. I guess it’s I Oh, I’m not sure. Yeah, we got we got to like watch it. Every time I
was trying to figure out which one was which, as we’ve been watching them move around. So
fast periods. Yeah. But what we’re looking at is the internal or you know, that we’re looking at him kind of spinning around each other. And so that’s we had that comment early on, I think from Great Britain. I’m pretty sure it’s where it’s from. But yeah, we had that. You saw this about the word of the man’s and he was telling us about this part of the we’re like the order that we see through the telescope isn’t necessarily the order like first, first to last. And then because they’re, you know, they’re in orbit, they’re in an elliptical orbit around Jupiter. And but they’re kind of at a flat plane to us. So we’re seeing them kind of pass back behind Jupiter, and then out in front of Jupiter. And so their order could be kind of scattered. And the observation when we look out or their order, inner to outer orbit can be scattered, from our perspective, looking two dimensionally out and into a telescope at it. But it’s cool, it’s really fun to observe. And then you kind of get a better understanding or about just like looking out at the stars, you’re going to get a quick understanding of what characteristics fit which moon, and you’d probably be able to identify each fairly quickly. Over time. It’d be fun, though. But it was fun to pull up the telescope and take a peek at it a couple times. And it’s just in such a good spot right now because it’s up all night long. And it’s it’s really bright. It’s really I think it’s one of its brightest positions that its brightest points that it’s going to be for us and it’s passing right now. So it’s cool. I’m not sure how that goes. I guess it does get dimmer and brighter as we get, you know, close side and then far aside from it, but I was wondering if that effects cheaper the same way as like it does Mars Mars right now is really bright. Like Yeah, like and how we were talking about it’s getting way brighter up and through the end of the month, the beginning of next month? Yeah. Yeah, well, Jupiter’s a little bit different. It does get dimmer there will be it’s very bright right now there will be times it will see it, where it’ll look a good bit dimmer, but really often it’s a pretty bright it is. It’s a pretty easy one to spot. Yeah, Saturn’s the one that’s a little bit more flexible. There are times where Saturn is really a significantly bright item in the sky. And then other times where it’s really very them same with Mars to Mars can be a suit just very nondescript, like a third magnitude, item in the sky, just a little point of orange. And then like, right now it’s almost as bright as Jupiter. It’s like a two and a half, or coming up on to two, negative two, excuse me negative two magnitude objects in the sky, since like, almost as bright as Venus gets in the evening, or Jupiter is up in the night sky now. It’s really, really quite bright. It’s cool. It’s cool to check out. But yeah, so she, I think there was, oh, there was other stuff about Jupiter too. So there’s the wall, there’s the full moon coming up. That’s tonight, it’s gonna be over towards Scorpio. And so if you stay up late enough, I guess around like 2am or so. You’d probably be coming up around here for us around 2am. But tonight, it’d be it’d be a little sooner. The full moon at least but you can look at you can see the full moon and then you can see Mars and Saturn out in the Scorpio and Mars is still making its track. I guess. East or east wordly into Scorpio. And then at the end of May like the 13th it’s gonna pull it back out towards Libra. Which is gonna be real strange. Yeah, that’d be cool. We should look at Mars at its real close pass. And then we should look at Saturn we should see its rings too because I guess right now it’s a good position to observe the rings would be cool here on Mars. When you look at it through a telescope. You can see the ice caps. Oh, really? Yeah. And I guess it kind of gray or greenish and sort of an optical illusion with the reddish color or I just kind of balance it or try and white balance it. And so this white color or gray color ends up looking kind of green to us at the beginning. Early on, they thought it was a seasonal change or mas was a planet and it was going through its growing season at that time. And so there was like a field growing or like algae growing or something is what they thought some kind of crop grow in the marshes just drawing your crop. Yeah. Yeah. There they was. But it was really just this kind of gray. I guess frost or ice cap is something like that, but they need to observe. It was cool. You can’t you can’t see really quite a bit. I’m not sure what it is, is going to show like we’re talking about the McCandless telescope. So we’ll see we might not see the planet
Mars, we may be able to resolve something but kind of like Jupiter. In my Am I really appear sort of similar to that. Saturn’s Saturn satisfying, because you can really make out that ring. Yeah. And you’re like, Whoa, this little.oh you’re really cool to see. Yeah, really cool. And it gets way more fun when you get a better telescope. Yeah, like we’re talking, talking about the object of a telescope is to collect as much light as possible. So the wider that that aperture gets, the more light you’re going to be able to collect a similar light to how we talk about photography, the wider the aperture gets, the more light is going to be led in in a shorter amount of time. And so for our eye, what that allows us to do is as we get past, let’s say for like, a reflector telescope, like a dobsonian, or Newtonian telescope, if we get past a six or an eight inch or up to a 10 inch barrel, then we’re able to collect a lot of light and get a better resolution. And I’ve really seen some pretty impressive views of the planets like you can see, like, you can see a lot of banding in Jupiter. And you can see a pretty significant amount of moon it’s really cool. It is really cool. Yeah, or Saturn t you can see more texture and or you can just kind of make out the ring in a better way doesn’t look like kind of a fuzzy dot with a hat on it. It looks a little silly sometimes, but at other times it can be pretty fun. So yeah, I guess a full moon tonight. And then what else is going on? I don’t think there’s gonna be too much going on for the rest of the week. It sounded like it was going to be a little low. There are a few a few things going on. There’s like a comment out in fucus. But it was like a sixth or seventh magnitude it’d be real difficult to see it’s one of those deep sky objects that we’ll wait until we get that big telescope. Calm and think a little more. Good plan. I want to see a cool comic come by again. Like, it’s been years and they’re rare. That’s why they’re cool is you know, they haven’t like a handful of times in life. But I guess that’s why Halley’s Comet was always so cool because it was predictable. Results kind of 87 year cycle. We’re probably the people who really may not get to see it because it’s like having like, just a couple years after we were born. So I think we have to wait around. Yeah, we have to wait around for like the 20 2080s. Fingers crossed, but 2080s man, what are we gonna be doing that? be crazy.
Looking out of our super giant telescope. Super giant Halley’s comet.
Yeah. Well, the biggest stars go back. 2080 did pretty cool. But yeah, I think that’s just about everything that we have to talk about for this episode of the night sky podcast. I want to say thank you very much for joining me today. I want to say to anyone listening, I appreciate it very much. Leave us a comment. She does a message or something like that, or subscribe or rate, the podcast, anything like that kind of helps establish that it’s actually a podcast, which would be cool to do. So if you could do that for us. That’d be awesome. I guess you guys can tune in next time. Thanks for subscribing. And on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Newman. And thank you very much for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.