Thank you. There is a NASA app for iPad that could be useful as a learning aid.
Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#22Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#23The article states "Around midnight, it will be directly overhead." This depends where you are, and it will not be true for most humanoids. From Washington, DC, for instance, it will be 45 degrees up from the horizon at midnight: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter+sky+position+fr...
From Oslo, Norway, a little under 9 degrees: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter+sky+position+fr...
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#24These always seem a little overblown. Jupiter was very nearly as bright last year. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=magnitude+of+jupiter+se... -2.92 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=magnitude+of+jupiter+au... -2.86 So the ratio in brightness is 2.512 ^ 0.06 = 1.0567 If wolfram alpha is to be believed, it's going to be just about as bright next year. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=magnitude+of+jupiter+oc…
The distance to Jupiter varies between very far and very, very far.
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#25The article states "Around midnight, it will be directly overhead." This depends where you are, and it will not be true for most humanoids. From Washington, DC, for instance, it will be 45 degrees up from the horizon at midnight: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter+sky+position+fr... From Oslo, Norway, a little under 9 degrees: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter+sky+position+fr...
If it's directly overhead on midnight (over the equator), it must be a Sun-Earth-Jupiter alignment, which makes sense as it is the closest distance between both planets in the Earth year.
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#26The article states "Around midnight, it will be directly overhead." This depends where you are, and it will not be true for most humanoids. From Washington, DC, for instance, it will be 45 degrees up from the horizon at midnight: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter+sky+position+fr... From Oslo, Norway, a little under 9 degrees: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=jupiter+sky+position+fr...
it will not be true for most humanoids
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#27In NYC it will appear as a stalled airplane between clouds.
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#28Is there a good iPhone app that uses both the GPS and the Compass to do star finding and identification?
I've got pUniverse and StarmapPro that I like. I just downloaded Planets, but haven't given it a try yet.
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#29This reminds me of an incident on Friday night: I noticed an unusually bright planet in the sky, and checked it out with Google Night Sky on my Android phone. When I zoomed in, the software showed the disc of Jupiter overlapping with Uranus. I sure was amazed!
I checked now, and the planet conjunction list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_%28astronomy_and_as... indicates that this conjunction has happened several times recently, but won't be happening for a while now.
Re: Tonight Jupiter making closest approach in nearly 50 years
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? That seems unlikely. Very few people have ever made such a claim, though it does seem that it could be possible. http://www.denisdutton.com/jupiter_moons.htm
Yeah, I get lots of people saying that. All I can say is, I was there, I could see it, my brothers and sisters could see it. We used a telescope to spot, then when the moon was at its furthest distance, with the naked eye, could see a separate blip. Lived on a farm in Iowa, nobody for miles, no lights to mess things up.
You know, what bugs me is, people talk and talk about this, write articles and posts, but nobody GOES OUTSIDE AND LOOKS! You think writing an article about it would be worth investing in an afternoon driving out of town to where it gets dark, tilting your head up at the sky, and squinting. But no, decades go by with no new info on the topic, people just repeating what amount to urban legends.