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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   Jupiter and its moons
Thursday, September 17 2009
Today, after another day procastinated away chipping away at the greenhouse well or not finding a suitable site for the outhouse, night descended and I went out to look at the sky. The air was clear and cloudless and Jupiter was the brightest thing in the sky, to the southeast somewhere in the ecliptic. From our parking area, Jupiter seemed to hang over the part of the house that includes our living room. So I resurrected a tripod that had been in the garage since at least 2006, attached it to my Galileoscope, and went out to look at Jupiter. It's important to mention at this point that, though I've looked through telescopes on occasion, the only things I've ever seen through them were distant birds in the Amazon. I've never seen the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter except in photographs. Mind you I've had access to telescopes and tried to see these things, but the whole experience has always ended up sucking. Cheap telescopes present a huge barrier-to-entry to astronomy, what with their crappy optics, imprecise mounts, and the 14 year old know-it-alls who own them.
But somehow I got the crappy tag-sale tripod's legs extended in a way where they held their positions and then attached the Galileoscope. With the sticky non-geared mechanism of the tripod, it was difficult to point it at Jupiter. But eventually I did. And there it was, as obvious as your girlfriend kissing your best friend. Jupiter was a big disk with faint reddish details and there on either side of it were tiny points of light in a perfect little line parallel to the ecliptic. If I didn't know quite what I know, I'd think it was its own little solar system, with Jupiter as a sun and its moons as planets. Here it was, one of the most startlingly incontrovertible bits of evidence that we are not the center of the Universe. Galileo saw this, and the story it told him ended up placing him in house arrest. But there was no way he could have seen this and thought it was anything but its own little gravitational universe. Those moons move so quickly around Jupiter that I came back to the telescope after a three hour absence, repointed it at the now-moved Jupiter, and saw that Io had already disappeared from its former obvious position (several Jupiter-diameters to the west) and was now invisible (either in front of or behind Jupiter).
You can know about Jupiter and its moons, but there's something about seeing that system with your own eyes, as it is at that moment, that drives all that theory home, down out of the neocortex and into the lizard brain beneath, a place not-especially-capable of comprehending such things. The web is great, but there's no place you can go to see Jupiter in real time, as it is, hanging above your house.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090917

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