Opinions Please! Jupiter and Moons

[edosaurus_rex]

All,

I know the last thing you want right now is another Edosaurus_rex prediction list (choking). But what do you think of this?

Dates and times for when Jupiter and its' moons look like this

J 1 2 3 4

or like this

4 3 2 1 J

As a bonus, the Royal Straight Flush would be if the GRS was also visible on the surface of Jupiter. I think it would make for a very visually interesting sublect.

Let me know what you think.

Ed K

[Starcrazzy]

Hi,
Have you got starry night??an exellent programme...I don't have time right now but you can zoom out to jupiter and watch the ballet of his moons and rotation in real time or speed it up and find out when the allignment will be 1234j or vise versa..
luck

[davidpretorius]

Is it easily done / worked out???

[vespine]

There is a great graph of the four moon's positions for the rest of this year in Austronomy Australia 2006. I have it at home, I'll have a look if no one has answered by then, it would easily show if this configuration is possible... From memory, I don't think "all configurations" of moons are possible, because the cycles of the moons are related by qyiute low factors of like 2 or 3 I think. I could very well be completely mistaken because I only had a quick look and wasn't thinking about something like this when I did... I WILL have a look when I get home, tried to google a few links but no luck..

[Starkler]

Im sure there will be a lot more instances of when this occurs than when the moons are at the right angle and at a time to be visible to us..... and then theres clouds to factor in :doh:

[Vermin]

The Planets (Version 2.02) (http://www.cpac.freeserve.co.uk/docs/solar.htm)is the handy Jupiter event prediction freeware I use.

[edosaurus_rex]

Okay,

I got the updated version of the program written but haven't added the GRS part of it. Here's what I got for a short run at search increments of 5 minutes.

2006 APR 06 at 0310 to 0445UT
2006 APR 17 at 1310 to 1730UT (good for IIS crew)

There will be about 35 more opportunities the remainder of this year with a real whopper lasting 18hrs on 14-15 Sept! Io gets chased by Europa for several hours.


Ed K

[Muddy Diver]

Ed. What program are you writing? Sounds good.

[edosaurus_rex]

It's a home-brewed one I did using QBASIC and the algorithm found in Meeus' "Astronomical Algorithms, 2nd Ed" I added the bit to check when each moon was visible and 2>1, 3>2, away from Jupiter etc.

Jupe will be rising here in a little bit and there's and opportunity for me to see it that way. It's cloudy here right now - maybe next time.

The resulting list is in another post in this forum. Your next opportunity is 17 Apr GRS and all!

By the way, Saturn does a S1234567 on 06 Oct at 0248UT! Sorry Mike had to sneak that one in there.

Ed K