The late hours of Monday night (24.08.09) brought an opportunity to take in a quick observation of Jupiter with the 25×100 binoculars. Initially I could only discern three of the Galilean moons, but further investigation revealed the fourth elusive satellite — Io — hugging close by Europa. Upon checking ‘The Night Sky’ section in my August edition of Astronomy Now I realised that I was witnessing a burgeoning occultation as Io converged upon Europa. Unfortunately I was unable to watch this entire Jovian event unfold, but it was fascinating to see the wafer-thin gap between the shimmering moons slowly disappear as they drifted towards their celestial rendezvous.
Tags: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Io, Jupiter, Occultation, Strathspey 25x100
Great sketch, Ewan. Watching those moons close up or widen back out in real time is just amazing to me.
Did you have much trouble getting that rollover effect to work in WordPress? Over at ASOD, it’s really touchy when we add a rollover…it wants to substitute line breaks in weird places & kills the effect if we aren’t careful. Anyway, very nice use of the function for labeling!
Jeremy
Thank you for your kind words Jeremy. Jupiter is probably my favourite planet. I can never quite get over the idea that those little gems of light are actually large moons. It always astounds me!
I’ve not experienced any trouble using rollovers, but I also know that WordPress can be a temperamental creature. To handle the rollover function I use the pixy method by placing the master image and the annotated image within a single file. You can then use the background-position property to shift the image to reveal the hidden annotated version. I’m more than happy to share the CSS code if you haven’t tried this out before?
It’s always a pleasure to see your comments on the blog. Thanks again.
Ewan