A Bright Star

Now that we are back living significantly above the 45th parallel, far west in our time zone, it is getting dark way before Audrey's bed time. One of her favorite activities as of late is to bundle up after dinner, go outside, and look for the moon and for airplanes.

Tonight was a rare cloudless fall night in our neck of the woods and she was so excited that she could see tons of airplanes the moment we walked out the door. I had to explain to her that "airplanes move" and since the dots weren't moving, those were stars.

She then looked around and pointed to a hugely bright object above our neighbors roof line and asked "Is that a star?". I don't know much about astronomy, but I did know enough to say "I think that is a planet" and luckily I had Google's star map on my phone to verify my claim. Sure enough, Jupiter was out and extremely bright. We talked a little about planets and stars and I knew you can see Jupiter's moons with some heavy duty binoculars so I thought it was worth a shot with my camera. I thought it might work, but I really didn't know if I had enough magnification.

I grabbed my longest lens (200mm), which on my camera is about 6.3x magnification. I braced the camera against my truck, turned on "live view", zoomed to 10x in live view (so, now we are at 63x magnification), manual focused, turned on image stabilization, and sure enough there were little tiny dots next to the "bright star".

I made Kelly come out and brave the cold to get a look and we tried to hold Audrey up to see it but I finally decided to go grab my tripod so I could do it "hands off". Once we got it set up, Audrey came over, looked at the back of the camera, and actually counted the moons of Jupiter (the visible ones, at least). How cool is that?

The first picture is the ~6x magnification. If you click through, you should still be able to see some faint dots. The second picture is a crop of the 60x magnification, so it is magnified even more than 60x.

We came back inside and looked at "good" pictures of Jupiter and the rest of the solar system to cap off our first big astronomy lesson. I think she now firmly knows that Jupiter is the biggest planet and we live on the one that is half blue. Scientist in the making? Who knows.