Rescheduled for January 14th,
at 5:00 P.M. due to inclement weather
JupiterWatch
Celebrates 400th Anniversary of Galileo’s Discovery
The evening of January 7th, 2010 marks the 400th anniversary of the
discovery of
the large moons of Jupiter. Galileo Galilei while looking at
the planet Jupiter on the
evening of January 7th, 1610, noticed several small bright “stars” near
Jupiter that
made a straight line through the planet. After a week of
observations and
recordings of Jupiter and these bright “stars” near Jupiter, Galileo
concluded that
the four star-like objects were orbiting the planet offering the first
observational
evidence that the Earth was not the center of the
Universe. Galileo’s observations
of the four large moons of Jupiter helped to usher in the present age
of scientific
understanding of the universe.
In celebration of this anniversary, members of a local informal
astronomy coalition;
ASTROLABE Astronomy Club, the Near Earth Object Foundation, and staff
of the
SMART-Center will bring telescopes, clipboards and paper for the
general public to
try their hand at making their own observations and recordings of
Jupiter and it’s
moons – 400 years to the day after the moons were discovered by Galileo
with the
aid of a telescope. The JupiterWatch event is scheduled to
start at the Marshall
County Trail head in Glen Dale (near the old Marx Toy company) at 5:00
p.m.. The
telescopes will be set up across the train tracks behind Glen Dale
Park. The public
is invited to bring their own telescopes to the JupiterWatch.
The JupiterWatch event is part of the NanoScale PlanetWalk project,
funded in part
by a grant from the NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium to the
Near Earth
Object Foundation. The JupiterWatch event is part of the
International Year of
Astronomy 2009 Celebration.
Robert E. Strong, Director of the Near Earth Object Foundation and the
SMART-
Center is the coordinator for the January 7th JupiterWatch event and
the NanoScale
PlanetWalk project. For more information
contact robert@smartcenter.org