Caoimhín's Content

Today we are taking a look ahead to September 9th to take a look at Jupiter at the behest of a commenter. I was informed that something would happen with Jupiter on September 9th, something that is worth looking at. I was given a location to look at it from which isn’t in Ireland, but we’re going to take a look at Jupiter here in the morning first.

I was given a time of 5:19, so let’s move a little bit earlier here to see if we can see anything in particular happening. From here in Ireland it doesn’t look like it. We can see several of Jupiter’s larger moons, the Galilean moons. Even with a smaller telescope, those would be visible. Jupiter is very low to the horizon at the moment, so there’s only a brief period of time where it’s visible in a good level of darkness before the light of the Sun intervenes, it would be difficult to look at with a telescope. Jupiter is up, we can see that much at least, and if we pull back out, we should see that the Moon is fairly nearby. The 9th, of course, is just a few days before the New Moon, which is the 11th, which I mentioned in the previous piece. The Moon is just a very narrow, waning crescent. It’s about to move between us and the Sun and disappear from view.

Jupiter is already a nice planet to take a look at, but I have been told a specific location to look from. We are going a little bit further north for this, up to 56°N to start with. I was given a precise location, right down to the seconds of latitude. Seconds of latitude normally don’t matter too much because they refer to such small locations on the Earth. For our longitude, we are going to 165°E. That brings us over to the Kamchatka Peninsula, or just off the coast of Kamchatka. This is the peninsula up above the Sakhalin Island, which leads to Japan. This peninsula is very much in eastern Russia, about as far east as we can get.

This is where I have been told to look for, and I was told to look at 5:19. However, Stellarium continued to show the same time it shows for Ireland, +1 UTC. Regardless, it does look like the Moon and Jupiter are very close together. Taking a closer look at Jupiter and the crescent Moon because, this is at least a very close conjunction if not a partial occultation. Jupiter does get partially obscured by the Moon, just a little bit. This is very similar to the far future event that we discussed in a piece video where Venus had a very close conjunction from some locations and an occultation from others with the crescent Moon. That was a waxing crescent Moon in the evening, this is a waning crescent Moon in the morning.

Of course I do want to check if this becomes more of an occultation from other locations, but it is going to be a little bit difficult to see this because the Sun is getting quite bright. I would suggest maybe observing this with the naked eye. Without the local time, I’d say 4pm UTC. 4 o’clock UTC is when to start observing this, which is about 4 or 5 in the morning from Kamchatka. Jupiter is still visible as we push forward, until about 5:20 UTC and then Jupiter vanishes due to the brightness of the Sun. It would be unsafe to observe this with a telescope. Really just as jupiter approaches the moon is when I would put away the telescope and switch to using the naked eye. Of course it would be tempting to stay forward until we reach the point of partial occultation, but it’s fairly bright by then. We do want to be careful, not just with our eyes, but with our expensive astronomical equipment which can be damaged if it looks at things that are too bright.

Just as we did when we took a closer look at Venus’s close approach to the Moon I am going to be greedy and see if I can improve this view any little bit. I don’t think moving by seconds of latitude is going to make too much of a difference, but moving by minutes does. If we push a little further north, of course there’s not many people that live that far north on planet Earth, but that leads to Jupiter fully occulted by our Moon and Jupiter’s four largest moons as well. We’ve moved further north here, we’ve moved back onto the part of Russia that’s near the Bering Strait, the Chukchi Peninsula, very far east just above Kamchatka. This gives us a true occultation. With a telescope, Callisto gets occulted first, then Ganymede, followed by Jupiter and lastly Io getting occulted. They’ll only remain occulted for a few minutes. It is a couple of minutes, although the Moon moves quickly, that’s why our solar eclipses are so brief, but because Jupiter is so small, it takes a while for it to fully move out from behind the Moon. This is also a great time to be seeing the Moon, as a thin waning crescent all of the cracks and craters along the terminator are visible.

Just as we did for the last piece where we took a look at Venus doing something similar, I’m going to check the view with a simulated telescope and see what kind of telescope can give us a good view. I think the telescope view in Stellarium is very honest about the amount of extra light that’s going to be visible, there’s quite a lot of extra light visible here, and that is going to make this difficult to see. That’s why it is safe to use a fake simulated telescope rather than actually risking your eyes trying to do this. It looks like a Celestron C11 with a 26 millimeter Plossl ocular and a x3 Barlow eyepiece gives a good enough view. That reveals Jupiter and as it vanishes behind the Moon, with all of those cracks and craters, before it eventually emerges out the other side. As I keep saying, the Sun would be too bright to actually do this. It is important to protect your eyes and your telescopes, but at least simulations of it are safe.

We now know that moving further north improved that occultation. Let’s see what happens if we change our longitude rather than our latitude. We still get an occultation, but at a different time. We are so close to the equinox that the terminator, the boundary between daytime and nighttime on the Earth, it’s getting closer to a straight line from north to south. When we are closer to the solstices, the terminator is tilted across the Earth because the Earth is tilted towards, or away from, the Sun. The terminator would still be a little tilted in early September, but not as much. That does make me wonder if this is going to be visible from the other hemisphere, from down south.

Let’s try, we’ll go as close as we can to the same longitude which should be okay, that should bring us to just off the coast of Australia. Our latitude is very different, down to 32°S. At 165°E brings us off the coast of Australia practically into New Zealand, but let’s take a look just in case this is also visible from the other hemisphere because the line of the terminator shouldn’t be too different. At sunrise they’re getting close, but they’re not quite right. It doesn’t look like an occultation, or as close of a conjunction, is visible. It looks like the northern hemisphere is going to be the place to view this from. There is a chance that it would be visible from somewhere on the southern hemisphere, but parallax may be changing our view too much.

This is something that’s going to be visible for very few people. There are not many people living on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It is a fairly underpopulated region but there is at least one major city and a few more smaller ones. The major city in the Kamchatka Peninsula is Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. It’s name actually mentions Kamchatka so that’s what I went with. That brings us lower on the planet, to just 53°N. We’re definitely getting only a close conjunction rather than an occultation, but this is at least a location that people will be able to see it from. Stellarium has actually changed the time, to UTC +12. That sounds right, so it’s just after 5 o’clock in the morning when we’re the Moon is just next to Jupiter, if you are living in Kamchatka,

I hope any of my readers from Kamchatka are watching out for this close occultation-conjunction. Close conjunction, brief occultation, partial occultation of Jupiter, whatever you get to see from wherever you are, I hope you get to see it. If not, at least you know now what it will be like. I hope that you enjoyed this piece. If you did then please do like it. If you like this kind of content then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.