Today we are going to be looking at some occultations and conjunctions involving Jupiter’s Galilean moons, the four largest moons of Jupiter. We will start by taking a closer look from Ireland, as I usually do, just in case we’re getting any conjunctions or occultations or partial occultations, anything of the sort from here in Ireland. We usually aren’t, but this time it looks like Ganymede and Io are fairly close together on the 1st of November. We will zoom in and take a closer look. We have gotten close before, but this time we really have Io partially occulting Ganymede. This one was actually visible from here in Ireland, at just about 1:45 in the morning on the 1st of November.
As I’ve mentioned in previous pieces, these occultations are quite common, you just have to be in the right location at the right time to catch them. In fact, we might be getting another one from here in Ireland on the 4th, so let’s zoom in and take a closer look again. Io and Ganymede are still the pair closest together, and this occultation is the other way around, with Ganymede partially occulting Io at 2:26 in the morning. These occultations, different ones are visible from all over the world, and in today’s piece we’re going to be viewing a few of them from a few different locations around the world, similar to how we have done in the past.
We’re going to start back on the 1st and we are going to head to Accra, the capital of Ghana. As with everywhere, Jupiter will be up in the morning, but now it can be quite early in the morning, albeit still after midnight. You may know that from Ireland to Ghana, we’re still on a very similar longitude. We’re not exactly on the zero line in Ireland, we’re about 8 degrees west, but we are fairly close. Even though this is a different latitude, we are at a pretty similar longitude. As such, it does make sense that we would see a similar occultation. Certainly it is still only a partial, but Io is still definitely partly in front of Ganymede. We will change our location again, gradually to try and do a little bit of fine tuning. We’ll try moving east a little bit, and the moons appear twist around, but they don’t cover each other any more or less. Part of the reason for this is that Io and Ganymede are so close to each other, despite being quite far from us here on Earth, we’re not going to see their relative position changing that much just because we’ve changed out position.
We are going to head to another location, looking at the same occultation. We’re heading to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan. We’re going to a more eastern longitude, in Central Eurasia, and we still have Io and Ganymede. This is the same occultation on the same date, and we were able to see this occultation from all the way over in the West of Africa, and all the way over to Central Asia further east. We were able to see it from down near the equator in Ghana, we could see it from further north here in Ireland, and in between in Turkmenistan. The whole region of the world in between, that whole region is got to see this occultation on the 1st, and I believe that principle is going to hold for the other occultations that we’re about to check out.
We are heading back to Africa, to Bissau in Guinea-Bissau, which is also Western Africa. We are also going to the change date, forward to the 4th. It looks like Ganymede and Io are getting very close together again. We’ll move through a little bit of time and we end up with Ganymede blocking out a substantial portion of Io. This time we are going to jump, we are going to skip the intervening locations and go all the way to Baku in Azerbaijan, just on the west of the Caspian Sea. We’re still looking at the 4th, and we still have Ganymede and Io still overlapping each other. We’re seeing this at 6:30 in the morning, which would be very close to the sunrise. The sky is starting to get bright, but Jupiter is very high in the sky, far from the sunrise, so that does make it a little bit safer. Then again, I do think this would be a little tricky, perhaps a little risky, to look at through a telescope. It is better to see it as its beginning, closer to 6:20 than as its ending, by the time we’re through to 6:30. All the same, Ganymede and Io are visible occulting each other from these two different locations.
This will be visible from the western coast of Africa over in Guinea-Bissau, and from Baku, Azerbaijan. Let’s pick a point somewhere in the middle, we’ll say the Mediterranean, around Malta. Ganymede and Io are still visible. It’s still visible a bit further north in Europe and a little further south in Africa. That whole region of the world is going to get to see this, we’ll even get to see it here in Ireland. If we try moving a little too far eastward, we’ll get into daytime. Once we cross the Caspian Sea, we are looking at a local time of 6:15, but the Sun would be after rising too much, we do want to be in darkness. If we move too far the opposite direction, westward to start crossing the Atlantic, they end up under the horizon. These pairs of viewing locations are giving us a range of where these events will be visible. We now know on the 1st and the 4th of November, Europe, including Ireland, is part of that range, along with huge regions of Africa and into Central Eurasia. We’re going to take a look at at least one more.
We’re headed to Road Town, the capital of the British Virgin Islands. The British Virgin Islands are an overseas territory of the United Kingdom, but this is still the capital of a territory or protectorate. We’re over in the Caribbean and we are moving forward to the 11th of the 11th, the 11th of November. Once we get close enough to morning time, Jupiter and Mars come above the horizon, so we’ll zoom in on Jupiter. We’ve got Ganymede and Io coming together, with Ganymede just partially occulting Io and we’re seeing this in the Caribbean. Road Town in the British Virgin Islands is our westernmost location, the next location is going to be the easternmost. We’re heading to Berlin, the capital of Germany in Central Europe. We still have the occultation occurring, with Ganymede in front of Io. This occultation is visible across the entire Atlantic, so for anyone living on the Azores, you’re going to be in a good position to see this particular one. Even from capital of Bermuda, Hamilton, they’re still overlapping. This should be visible all through Western Europe, such as Ireland and Spain, but then as we cross too far into Eastern Europe, we’re coming up to daytime and it would be too bright.
We will revisit these partial occultations in a future video. We do have a few more coming up even later in the month and we will look at a few more of these ranges, from where to where is the occultation visible. I hope that you get to see some of these partial occultations, I’ve now shown that they are visible over a big portion of the world. They’re very achievable things to see, as long as you have a big enough telescope to catch some of Jupiter’s moons. If you don’t get a chance to see them in real life, at least you’ve gotten an idea of what they would be like. I very much 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.
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