I got out my telescope the other night and had a look at Jupiter. Jupiter was almost directly overhead at about 11pm. The thumbnail to the left isn’t my own image, but it’s pretty much what I saw except that I had a clearer image with crisp edges on Jupiter, and I could see stripes on the surface. The moons appeared as clear, crisp distinct dots. It was glorious, and quite moving that I was looking at something which had first been seen in the same way by Galileo almost exactly 400 years ago in August, 1609.

Jupiter will be at perihelion about this time next year which means that it is at it’s closest approach to the sun which in turn means it is close to Earth, so I have 12 months to figure out how to get a camera onto my telelscope so I can take my own photos. Then I can feed them through photoshop and try and bring out some of those colours.