Sunday, January 6, 2008

I saw the beautiful planet Saturn and its ring system a few nights ago


from http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/rings/#faq

I saw the beautiful planet Saturn and its ring system a few nights ago at Powell Obervatory in Louisbourg, KS (south of Kansas City) through the 30 inch telescope. Galileo discovered it with his small telescope hundreds of years ago and each time I see it is still wonderful.
While I watched, I knew Saturn isn't the only planet with rings. But these other celestial rings are more difficult to see.
Here is a picture of Jupiter's ring first discovered in 1979
There is also now new evidence that these rings are created by meteoroids crashing into the small Jupiter's nearby moons.(if not 1/6/2007 go to archives). http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
"The same year, most of the important observations of Jupiter's rings were provided by Voyager 2 after it went into the shadow of the giant planet and looked back toward the sun and saw a system of three rings. In this image from NASA, the spacecraft captured a faint outer ring, apparently made up of fine, microscopic particles. This was named the gossamer ring.

Do you know which other planets have rings? More later

1/6/2008
(E.O.A.S.blog 1) http://eoas-dreric1kansas.blogspot.com/
Students will discover information about other planets and compare/ contrast the conditions/ characteristics to that of Earth

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