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Health & Fitness

Jupiter

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. It has the mass of about 318 Earths. It is so big that if you added up the mass of the rest of the planets in our solar system they would be less than half the size of Jupiter. Even though Jupiter is so big it is only one thousandth the size of the Sun. If the Sun were the size of your front door, the Earth would be the size of a nickel and Jupiter would be the size of a basketball. If Jupiter were about 80 times larger than it is, it could have become a very small star.

It is about 480 million miles from the Sun. The Earth is about 92 million miles from the Sun, so Jupiter is pretty far away from us, at least 388 million miles and usually much more. Jupiter spins once about every 11 hours which is much faster than the spin of the Earth (24 hours). Its upper atmosphere has differently colored clouds that move rapidly and appear as bands across the planet through a telescope from Earth.

Jupiter is a gas planet, made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are also gas giants but smaller than Jupiter. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are rocky planets and are much smaller than any of the gas planets.

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Jupiter is the 5th planet from the Sun and has many moons. Four of its moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are usually visible through a telescope. These 4 moons were discovered by Galileo in January of 1610 – 404 years ago. Today they are known as the Galilean moons of Jupiter but Galileo called them the Medician Stars because he thought they were little stars (they do look like little stars in a telescope) and he wanted to honor the Medici family, which was very powerful and supported Galileo’s work.

When you look up at a clear night sky Jupiter appears to be one of the brightest stars. Jupiter is among the top 4 brightest objects we can see from the Earth - Sun, Moon, Venus and Jupiter. Jupiter doesn’t give off any light of its own, it just reflects light from the Sun back to us. This is also true of the Moon and Venus.

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On January 5, 2014 Jupiter will be at opposition. Opposition means that the Earth is between Jupiter and the Sun and Jupiter is close to the point directly opposite from the Sun in our night sky. This means Jupiter is as near to the Earth as it generally gets and we get our best view of it. So if you want to look at Jupiter, this is a really good time for it. At midnight Jupiter will be high in the sky but you can see it very well from about 8pm on when it will be high to the south east. To the naked eye it will look like a bright star but with a telescope it is very clearly a disk with shaded bands usually surrounded by 4 small star-like dots (the Galilean moons).

Look at the Facebook page Sidewalk Astronomy in Lynbrook for times when I will be in the parking lot at the Atlantic Avenue Walkthru in Lynbrook for free views of the Moon and Jupiter through a telescope.

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