Hubble Spots Triple Eclipse On Jupiter

[zavvy]

<b>Hubble Spots Triple Eclipse On Jupiter</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />Three large moons hang in the daytime sky above Jupiter in a newly released image, casting a trio of shadows on the planet. Such a triple eclipse occurs only once or twice per decade.<br /><br />The Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer took the image earlier in 2004, when the three largest of Jupiter's 63 known moons passed between Jupiter and the Sun. The moons - all discovered by Galileo in 1610 - circle the planet at different rates, making the event relatively rare.<br /><br />Furthermore, two of the moons are themselves visible in the image - an arrangement that occurs just a few times per century and one which has not been observed for 60 years. <br /><br />The volcano-dotted Io is the white circle at centre, with its shadow to the left at the same latitude. The solar system's largest moon, the icy Ganymede, is the blue circle at upper right, with its shadow again to the left at the same latitude. The shadow of Callisto is at the top right, but the moon itself is outside the picture.<br /><br />An observer on Jupiter would see three partially illuminated moons in the sky. But if he or she were in a moon's shadow, the event would be similar to a total solar eclipse on Earth.<br /><br />"In the middle of the shadow you would be in complete darkness," says Erich Karkoschka, an astronomer at the University of Arizona in Tucson who worked on the image. "You would see the other moons like ours in the sky. They would be of similar brightness to our Moon."<br /><br />The Near Infrared Camera on Hubble is also well suited to imaging colours on the planet, he adds. The colours represent clouds at different atmospheric altitudes, ranging in height from green, a thin haze at high altitudes, to yellow, to red and finally blue at low altitudes. <br /><br />Ganymede's blue patina is due to the absorp

 

[CalliArcale]

I think i speak for most of us here when i say....<br /><br /><br />COOL!!!!<br /><br /><br />This really is the sort of thing that gets me all excited about astronomy. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /> Events like this are just plain neat. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>