Night Sky Photography -- 01-07-2018 -- Mars & Jupiter Conjunction With Galilean Moons

Greetings fellow stargazers! 

Well folks, for my first planetary photography of 2018, I have a real treat for y'all. 

In the morning hour before sunrise I woke to clear skies and a perfect view of the Jupiter and Mars conjunction in the southeastern sky. Here is the best photo I managed to get of the two wanderers at their closest proximity.

Mars is approximately 0.25 degrees south of Jupiter (equivalent to half of the moon's diameter), and you can just barely make out the red coppery coloring. The two appear to join though in reality they are just over 342 million miles apart. Jupiter appears brighter to the naked eye, approximately 20 times brighter than Mars at the moment due to the relative positions of the planets. 

This will change by summer of 2018 when Mars once again reach its closest approach to Earth and grow larger in the night sky. By the end of the first week of July 2018, Mars will finally catch up with Jupiter in brightness. Then on July 31st, Mars reaches its closest proximity to the Earth and will shine the most brilliantly in Earth’s sky since 2003, actually outshine Jupiter by some 1.8 times in late July and early August. The Red Planet will reign as the fourth-brightest celestial body (or third brightest in the nighttime sky, after the moon and Venus) will last two months from about July 7 to September 7. 

It's also good that I managed to capture the conjunction of these two wanderers and blessed that the skies were clear of cloud cover. The next conjunction between Jupiter and Mars will not occur until Friday, March 20, 2020. 

Now folks for the unexpected, but pleasant bonus: when I checked my close-up photo of the conjunction, I discovered that my 35X optical lens managed to capture all four of the visible Galilean Moons: Io, Europa, Castillo, and Ganymede! 

These four moons are also known as the Galilean Moons in honor of famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei who discovered them in January 1610 using an improved telescope with a 20X magnification lens. 

These four are the largest of Jupiter's 69 known moons. Three of them: Io, Castillo, and Ganymede are just slightly bigger than our own beautiful Luna. Io is the closest at around 218,000 miles from Jupiter's clouds and Castillo is the most distant at a whooping 1,168,180 miles from Jupiter, giving y'all an idea of the scale and distance of the largest planet in our solar system as seen from Earth's sky. 

Well folks that is all for now, but this won't be the last time we see Jupiter and Mars this month. The two will stay pretty close together throughout the month of January and will meet up with the waning crescent moon on the morning of Thursday, January 11th. 

Thank y'all for checking out this blog post, be sure to leave a review, and as always keep looking to the night skies, y'all hear?