Jupiter

This awful photograph is my attempt to capture the planet Jupiter. I used a telescope that was actually designed for looking at wildlife, with a 40x lens. The beauty of a digital camera is that it will work in really low light levels because it has a quantum efficiency of over 70%. In other words, 70% of the light falling on its charge coupled device (CCD) is cpatured and recorded. The figure is 3% for old fashioned film, so a traditional camera won't take photographs through a telescope. You can tell that this is a planet and not a star because it forms a clear disc, not a point. In fact, I could see 4 of Jupiter's moons in a line stretching from the right of the planet. They have not come out in the photograph. I could even see light and dark bands on the surface of Jupiter. If you want to see Jupiter at the moment, it is the bright star in the south in early evening. So if you look from Wigton at 7pm, it will be the bright star above the Caldbeck masts. It was just such an observation that got Gallileo into trouble. He was the first person to see the moons of Jupiter. They change places over several days showing that they orbit Jupiter. In Gallileo's day, everything was supposed to orbit the Earth. Showing that moons orbitted another object seriously undermined the "Earth as the centre of the universe" theory.