Hi all
I'm enjoying three days with excellent skies here in Argentina; no even a cloud at sight. Hope you guys are having good skies too.
I just want to tell you about my observations of the 9th and 10th of this month... two days that I will remember for a long time. Nothing special for most, but it means a lot for me and my 76mm. scope. So here we go...
I wanted to get relaxed for a while on 9th night (last month I've been working a lot for school) so I decided to take out my scope to take a look at the moon, which wasn't able to be seen at night until a few days ago. After giving a look at the moon I decided to see Jupiter. When I had it in field I realized there was missing one Galilean Moon. I thought it should be behind the planet, or perhaps in front of it (thought I wasn't able to see it because of Jupiter's brightness). I watched the planet for a while, when I saw a really small dark dot close to the centre of the planet. It was really really small! (It wasn't easy to see, and sometimes it dissapeared - probably when the air moves) My idea was that it should be the Galilean Moon shadow... but wasn't very sure, as I didn't know if my scope was able to see a shadow of such a small diamater. I spent some minutes watching it and finally decided to check Stellarium out to see what I was watching. The moon that was missing was Io, and was in front of the planet, as I'd thought. I went out again and I sticked my eye to the scope (took me some minutes to be able to visualize the shadow again as I'd had exposed the eye to light). So I spent about an hour there, watching the small dot moving through the planet... until I was able to see Io! It's the first time I see a transit!
10th day at night was amazingly clear again so I took out the scope. I hadn't forgotten the experience of the day before, but I wasn't expecting to see anything new that night. I directly aimed to Jupiter and again... there was one moon missing!
I thought it should've been transiting again the planet, or perhaps it was hide behind it... I spent another hour there (my back was hurting - my chair isn't very comfortable lol -) and remained there, waiting for the moon to be seen. While I was waiting I saw sth that made me bristle my hair (idk if this expression is ok ). A line of light (idk how to describe it in english ) appeared for a fraction of a second and then went away. I thought it was a bolid (is this word ok? lol i'm not inspired today
), but asking in an Argentina astronomy forum I was told it was probably a "Flare de Iridium" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_flare) and that others astronomers had seen it too. What do you think guys?
So going back to Jupiter... At about 21:50hrs (argentina's time) I saw the moon appearing, but not from behind the planet... it appeared far away from it. It appeared very quickly (it took it about 3 minutes to be clearly visible), so I decided to check again Stellarium and it was an eclipse!. My first one too!
So, as you can see, I had a very exciting week! And now I'm leaving... clear sky again! What a good luck
Thx a lot for reading guys.
Cheers, Luis.
Edit: Some grammar mistakes