Spotting Jupiter's moons with a solar camera

Filed under pretty pictures, amateur image processing, the Sun, Jupiter, Jupiter's moons, Ganymede, Callisto, solar observing spacecraft

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Spotting Jupiter's moons with a solar camera

As SOHO monitored the Sun on April 5, 2011, Jupiter was passing through its field of view. SOHO's LASCO camera was able to resolve two of Jupiter's moons as points of light separate from the blazing "star" of their planet. Ganymede is to the left of Jupiter, and Callisto is to the right. Both appear to move from left to right over the course of the 23 hours of this animation.

NASA / ESA / SOHO / animation by Emily Lakdawalla

Copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about April 5, 2011