Thank-You Moons of Jupiter

   The odds of aiming a department store trash-scope at the sky and finding anything interesting to look at are, well, astronomical. Perhaps I should consider retiring my age-old conviction that I am plagued by bad luck: chances are anyone that ever uses one of these toy telescopes will permanently give up any future in sky watching, tragic really.  Heck, I was even born with a fair chance of seeing Haley's Comet twice in my life, though I don't recall seeing it when I was 6 (thanks Mom and Dad). I never bothered to make much note of some of the major comets visible from my stomping grounds in the mid-nineties either though so I guess I can't blame them.... The astronomer me was born at the age of thirty. On a scale as large as space, some things only happen once in a lifetime and many more occur far less frequently. Meteor showers can be seen year in and year out, while other events occur less regularly. Jupiter, for example, takes a dozen years to orbit the sun.

    This past summer, Jupiter, the King of Gods,  was brighter than anything I had noticed in the sky for some time and I was blessed with a good view of it on many nights. With my interest piqued by this bright heavenly body, I decided to try a different approach to using the junky telescope I had borrowed from my nephew. He, like so many, got this scope for Christmas. It claimed 600X magnification though on the best night it might deliver somewhere near 100X. My novel approach was to set it up slowly and patiently, to align the finders-cope during the day, use the finder-scope to locate the planet and to patiently line it up in the telescope to see what I could see. I guess you could say I'm getting old and in many ways I've noticed this to be a surprisingly beneficial development in my life.

    So I aim the thing at Jupiter and get it lined up - a fuzzy blob - and I slowly turn the focuser, realizing, as I go that I'm about to see something, albeit unimpressive. But a little surprise awaits me as I bring the small yellow disk into focus: four tiny pin pricks of light accompany my little planet. My mind explodes in wonder: I am seeing four moons of Jupiter. Their orientation on a parallel plane to Earth leave no doubt as to their orbit around the gas giant. As I gaze in wonder, the spectacle is slipping from view. I have to re-aim my telescope and am suddenly struck by the rotation of my own planet beneath my feet and the incomprehensible distances of the universe. An Astronomer is born. In the coming weeks and months I keep an eye on the moons on clear nights as they dance around Jupiter. I even can barely make out the darker reddish band seen in photos. With the advancing seasons, Jupiter is clearly marching further westward as it circles our star, the Sun. We are neighbors, brothers in a journey of epic proportions.