Steve’s Virtual Planet

Europa’s Shadow - Dec 13

Another fun night at Fernbank Observatory spending time with Jupiter. New moon that night and a nice crowd of fellow sky lovers. The GRS was up later so we would miss it but Europa was going to pop into view at 21:52. I had already noted the time using SVC. This would be another chance to show that we can predict these events quite easily.

Sure enough, it was there right on time! It only took a short time for the full brightness of the moon to make it pop out very clearly. The shadow of Europa was visible immediately inside the limb of Jupiter, small but very distinct, as the shadows normally are with good seeing. The sight of Europa emerging right after the egress was quite exciting since there were still a few die hard sky fans up in the observatory. So, we could get all four Galilean moons that night before closing up. It was good fun for all.