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Friday night’s rare triple shadow transit of Jupiter

View larger. | This triple transit took place on October 12, 2013.  John Rozakis in Athens, Greece captured it.  Photo used with permission.  Thank you, John!
View larger. | A triple transit of Jupiter’s moons on October 12, 2013. John Rozakis in Athens, Greece captured it. Photo used with permission. Thank you, John!

If you’re in the right place on Earth and have a telescope and clear sky – or if you have a computer and online connection – you can see a rare triple transit of Jupiter’s moons Friday and into Saturday morning, January 23-24, 2015. The moons are Io, Europa and Callisto – three of Jupiter’s four large Galilean satellites – which can be seen orbiting Jupiter in an endless dance, any night, with binoculars or telescopes. What’s special here is that the moons will be positioned in such a way that their shadows will fall on Jupiter’s cloudtops. What a treat for telescopic viewers!

Bob King at skyandtelescope.com explains:

The first shadow to touch down is Callisto’s, at 9:11 p.m (CST) Friday night, followed by Io’s at 10:35 p.m., and then Europa’s nearly two hours later at 12:28 a.m. Saturday morning. All three will freckle Jupiter’s face simultaneously for just 24 minutes. At 12:52, Io’s dark pinpoint is the first to leave the stage, followed by Callisto’s, and finally Europa’s at 3:22 a.m.

The last time we in the Americas saw a triple transit like Friday’s was October 11-12, 2013. See John Rozakis’ image above. If you’re in the U.S., and you miss Friday’s event, you won’t have another chance to see something like this via telescope on U.S. soil until December 30, 2032! These events are rare. For Earth as a whole, they happen only once or twice a decade.

If you plan to observe Friday night’s triple transit telescopically, visit skyandtelescope.com for details.

If you want to observe online, keep reading …

Griffith Observatory – which created the animation of the event above – will provide a live online broadcast of the Jupiter triple-shadow transit on its Livestream channel at https://new.livestream.com/GriffithObservatoryTV.

Griffith’s webcast will begin at 8:30 p.m. PST on January 23 (0430 UTC on January 24) and conclude at 11 p.m. PST (0700 UTC). Translate to your time zone here.

A time-lapse video of the event will be available in the days that follow the event on Griffith Observatory’s YouTube channel.

Posted 
January 22, 2015
 in 
Human World

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