Tonight we attempted to see the comet PanSTARRS again; but we had prayer meeting tonight and by the time we got outside the comet had set. But, I had my telescope with me (a Meade 3 1/2 inch Maksutov–Cassegrain with a field tripod and equatorial mount with motor drive) and so we looked at the crescent moon and Jupiter. Jupiter was beautiful tonight, near Taurus. And all four of the Galilean satellites were visible! This is what we saw:

This is based on a nifty java app that is on the Sky and Telescope website, called Jupiter’s Moons. It can give you a picture of the four Galilean satellites in real time, so you’ll know exactly what you’re looking at through a telescope or good pair of binoculars.

I modified the Sky and Telescope image using the opensource program GIMP, an excellent image manipulation program; it’s very powerful and can do most of what PhotoShop can do, but for free. If you don’t have a high end image manipulation program such as PhotoShop, and you need it, I recommend you get GIMP. It has a bit of a learning curve, but there are plenty of help files and tutorials available on the GIMP website and on YouTube.

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