By Jove!

Jove was a latin name for the God Jupiter, after whom the planet was named, and means Father God. No, he was not the Roman god of father’s, he was considered the Chief of all the Gods.

When i was at school Jupiter the planet was thought to have 12 moons, of which 4 were sometimes visible through binoculars or a small telescope. By 2003 that number had grown to 53. Currently we know of 79 satellites of Jupiter which are large enough to be graced with the name ‘moon’.

It was the fact that Saturday night was the night of a ‘Blue’ (full) moon that got me out at night with my camera again in sub 50 F weather taking pictures for posterity (and possible display on my blog!) 😉  where i did catch the ‘blue’ moon (a blue moon can be the third or fourth moon in any one of the four seasons in which four full moons occur) – but as i was looking high in the sky for it i also caught sight of a beautifully bright Jupiter and set my camera to take a picture… or a movie even!

(Click on images to open a new window and click again to expand it)  🙂

Jupiter is currently around 600 million kms from Earth! (400 million miles).

Both the moons and Jupiter are elongated because, at this extreme zoom and with such a low light source, i needed a four second exposure. Since the largest moon, Ganymede is some 5000 km (3250 mi) in diameter that means in 4 seconds the moons have travelled around 20 000 km! (The actual orbital speed around Jupiter is 10 800 km per second! The famous bands and red spot of Jupiter are almost impossible to catch on this camera owing to the size of the planet being so small in the CMOS sensors. Even so – i’m still impressed with the images. 🙂

 

 

The ‘Blue’ full Moon.

The red colour is from smoke molecules in the air from forest burn off’s designed to to reduce forest fire fuel loads.

The natural colour at 11 pm in a much clearer sky.

love.