At one point last week I looked at the weather forecast for the coming days and it showed nothing but clouds. I was disappointed, concerned that I would miss out on seeing the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. However, if there was one thing I learned leading up to the solar eclipse a few years ago, it's that forecasting cloud cover, even just a few days in advance, is very difficult.
Fortunately, on Sunday the clouds cleared out, and Wendy and I got to see the conjunction. I started with binoculars, but after a while got out the telescope and set it up. Both planets, along with Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings, were visible in the same field of view. It was a very cool sight. I took some admittedly terrible pictures with my cell phone; this is the one that turned out best:
Jupiter is the large bright spot on the right; Saturn is on the lower left. If you look closely, you can spot what sure look like five Galilean moons of Jupiter. That's rather surprising since there are only 4 Galilean moons. I suggested to Wendy that perhaps I'd just made a momentous scientific discovery. "McHenry Man Discovers New Moon of Jupiter!" the headlines would read. She wasn't buying it, and neither was I, to be honest. I figured it had to be a background star, but what are the odds a star would line up perfectly with the Galilean moons on one of the nights I look through the telescope?
After I was done looking at the conjunction (I looked at it for a good long while because it was just so darn cool), I went inside and used the free Stellarium program to figure out just what this "fifth moon" was. Here's the view Stellarium showed:
It looked exactly like what I saw. There was no label immediately visible on the object, which was between Callisto and Ganymede, so I knew it wasn't a moon. Clicking the object revealed that it was in fact a background star, going by the name of HIP 99314. So, mystery solved. No scientific discovery for me.
You might also notice that Stellarium shows a couple of Saturn's moons. It's possible that one of them, Titan, was visible in the telescope; I don't remember. I wish now that I'd looked at Stellarium before looking through the telescope. I'll have to remember that for next time.
Technically, Jupiter and Saturn were at their closest on Monday, but that day was totally cloudy here. I would have loved to look at them again, but I'm glad I at least got the opportunity on Sunday.
And with that, it's nearly midnight here. Merry Christmas!