Night Sky Astronomy

Archive for the ‘Spacecraft’ Category

It has now been a whole year since I received my telescope for my 30th birthday, and I have learnt so much in that time!

It was exactly a year ago that I found out which bright light in the sky was Jupiter so I thought that I would go out and view it again, now that I have had more experience with the telescope.

I wasn’t disappointed either as I managed to home in on the Red Planet pretty quickly and got it into focus using several lenses with minimal trouble. What I saw was again brilliant and I could make out four of Jupiter’s moons beside it.  In fact, whilst I was looking at the planet, one of the moon’s popped out from behind the right hand side of it, which  I thought was great! 😉  I could also make out the swirling colours of Jupiter when I used the highest magnification lens that was available to me.

Overall, I was very pleased with the evening’s Astronomy and it showed that I have definitely learnt loads about the night sky in the past year.

N.B. Jupiter is currently very bright in the Sky and is one of the first objects that you can see during and after dusk. You can’t miss it! 😉

The photograph of Jupiter below was taken by the Voyager 1 Spacecraft when it was still more than 25 million miles away on January 24th 1979.  The object on the bottom left is Ganymede which is Jupiter’s largest Moon.

The Red Planet Jupiter