The Giant Among Us:

Here are some photos I took of Jupiter using my telescope on the night of April 4th, 2018. The photo I am most proud of is the photo showing Jupiter’s bands. This wasn’t accomplished using the telescope alone. My telescope by itself could not resolve these features. Instead, I unfocused my camera. This made the photo dimmer, but also allowed the band features to stand out.

These bands correspond with clouds at different altitudes. The darker bands are clouds that are at a lower altitude than the bright bands. The reason for this difference in altitude comes from the rising and sinking of gases in the atmosphere. Gas rises from Jupiter’s interior beneath the bright belts and sinks beneath the darker belts.

In these two photos you can see the four Galilean moons, moons that were first spotted by Galileo Galilei in 1610. In order of distance from Jupiter their names are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Here is are a series of photos (in negative) taken on different nights. You can see here the motion of the moons:

Keep looking up!