Jupiter Moon Orbit Ribbons February 2015

Here are the orbit ribbons for Jupiter's moons for February 2015:

Io - Europa

Io - Ganymede

Io - Callisto

Europa - Ganymede

Europa - Callisto

Ganymede - Callisto

Io - Europa - Ganymede - Callisto

Connecting The Dots

The past few days I've been completely taken over by the artistry and beauty I'm seeing in the orbital structures I've been creating.  This project has exploded very much out of proportion and I see no end to it.

It started with asking the question: "what does the pattern look like if I find the positions of two solar system bodies (relative to the sun) and draw a line between them at the same moment in time?"  The result of that can be seen in my Jupiter-Earth "spirograph" I put in my previous post.

Now it's gotten much more complex and interesting....

First, the plots:

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 1 shows lines drawn at 15 minute intervals between Io and Ganymede over the course of 24 hours.  The blue lines indicate the paths of the orbits, and the black dot is the location of Jupiter.

Figure 2 is when it starts getting complex and interesting.  I've once again plotted the path of Io's orbit around Jupiter.  The other blue line represents the vector distance between Ganymede and Io.  I then connect these two lines to give the figure presented.

Figure 3 is simply the combination of the two.

I have yet to figure out how to interpret these images.  Sofar it's all I can say is that if you look at Figure 4, I've marked A1, B1, A2, and B2.  As you can see, the distance and angle between A1 and B1 is the same as those between A2 and B2.  This goes, I think, for the entire plot.  All of this makes perfect sense but I have no idea if there is any other information to be extracted from this kind of plot.

So on top of that, I'm also looking at incorporation this into the JT podcast, but in a different way.  All I want to do is show the relationships between the moons as they orbit Jupiter.  So I can do things like this:

Lines between Io and Europa, 28 January 2015

Lines between Io and Ganymede, 28 January 2015

Lines between Io and Callisto, 28 January 2015

Lines between Europa and Ganymede, 28 January 2015

Lines between Europa and Callisto, 28 January 2015

Lines between Ganymede and Callisto, 28 January 2015

I like how our brains assign surfaces to all of these plots.

All lines combined, orbit lines removed

All lines combined showing orbits

So these figures show all of the possible unique combinations between the four moons of Jupiter: Io:Europa, Io:Ganymede, Io:Callisto, Europa:Ganymede, Europa:Callisto, and Ganymede:Callisto.

What does all this mean?  No idea.  But the plots are very beautiful.

This kind of thing can be done for any number of bodies in the solar system over any kind of time interval.  The possibilities are virtually endless.

However, I'm most interested in what orbital information these plots can give me.  But I have some questions -- the first being: What's happening when these lines "pile up"?  I'll continue to look at all of this and see if I can come up with some answers and more questions.

Spirograph Solar System Objects

I've been having fun making "spirograph" style images of solar system objects.

Yesterday I was working with 2D images like these of Jupiter and Earth:

So what I've done here is go over to the JPL Horizons website and get the X, Y, and Z vectors for the Earth and Jupiter.  Eleven years (about one Jupiter year) with lines connecting Jupiter and Earth every week.  The result is the images you see on a 2D plane.

Today I turned to 3D images and moved to the asteroid 357439 (2004 BL86), which will be passing by Earth tomorrow.  I still need to work with gnuplot a lot more to get the kinds of plots that I want, but here's what I've got sofar:

These are very beautiful and the variation is nearly endless.

Here are some others from yesterday:

Earth and 1 Ceres 11 years, 1 line per week

Earth and Mars 11 years, 1 line per week, z=0, x=0

Earth and Mars 11 years, 1 line per week, z=140, x=50

Earth and Mars 11 years, 1 line per week, z=140, x=120

I'm a bit obsessed.....

Here are 10 years (2015-2025) of orbits of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and 357439 (2004 BL86) -- the asteroid possing Earth tomorrow.  Lines drawn between them once every seven days.  'x' and 'z' are the viewing angles in degrees.

x=0, z=0

x=50,z=150

x=90, z=0

x=90, z=120

x=150, z=150

Ok, one more.  This is the Jovian moons.  I've connected Io and Callisto, (red) and Europa and Ganymede (blue) using a radius of 1.1 million km.

Rare Jupiter Transit Events

Fairly rare triple shadows and triple moons are transiting the face of Jupiter on 24 January 2015.  Here are the timings and I'd appreciate it if someone would do the work to confirm these:

06:29 - 06:53 UTC    Io, Europa, and Callisto shadows all transiting (a 24 minute event)

07:09 - 07:13 UTC    Io, Europa, and Callisto moons all transiting (a 4 minute event)

This is a western hemisphere event.  If you're anywhere in North or South America, you will be able to observe these events.  Visibility maps for the two triple transits are shown below.

Here are some other events:

04:56 - 07:13 UTC    Io transit
07:09 - 10:03 UTC    Europa transit
06:20 - 11:03 UTC    Callisto transit

04:36 - 06:53 UTC    Io shadow transit
06:29 - 09:23 UTC    Europa shadow transit
03:12 - 08:01 UTC    Callisto shadow transit

06:29 - 06:53 UTC    Io & Europa shadows transit
04:36 - 06:53 UTC    Io & Callisto shadows transit
06:29 - 08:01 UTC    Europa & Callisto shadows transit

07:09 - 07:13 UTC    Io & Europa transit
06:20 - 07:13 UTC    Io & Callisto transit
07:09 - 10:03 UTC    Europa and Callisto transit

Watch Jupiter Today every day for information on events happening at Jupiter.

Visibility of Triple Shadow Transit Event 06:29 - 06:53 UTC

Visibility of Triple Transit Event 07:09 - 07:13 UTC

Crazy Fun

Apogee Podcast

I have a new Apogee Podcast out on the 365DaysOfAstronomy network.  You can check that out here, or just go to the main webpage and listen to the other great astronomy podcasts put out every single day.

Jupiter Today

I finally figured out the directions to the Earth and Sun in the new graphic that I've been trying to re-introduce into my daily podcast.  I'm glad to have this different perspective so the motions of the Galilean moons can be seen.

Here it is for my next podcast for 13 January 2015:

Figure 1: New JT graphic showing the motions of the four Galilean moons over the next 24 hours

First, the x and y axes are in units of kilometers.  The furthest away any moon gets (Callisto) is about 1.8 million km.  You can see the lines and dots representing the positions of the moons.  The dots indicate its position at 0h, 6h, 12h, 18h, and 0h UTC.  The blue line is the line of site from Jupiter to Earth.  The gray line is the line of site from Jupiter to the Sun.  So you can see in the graphic above that both Io and Europa are going to transit Jupiter (moving between Jupiter and the Earth), but slightly before that they cast their shadows onto Jupiter (moving between Jupiter and the Sun).  The quadrant system I've developed is, as far as I know, my own invention.  It just allows me to easily know where the moon are and how they're moving.  In quadrants 1 and 4, the moons are always moving eastward from Earth's point of view, and in quadrants 2 and 3 the moons are moving westward.

All of these plots are created with data taken from the JPL Horizons website. 

You can see and hear my latest podcast by going here, or click on the link on the right.

Measuring Algol with the MMTO All-Sky Camera

I have an attraction to all-sky cameras ever since I developed one to detect aircraft moving in the vicinity of a laser guide star beacon we developed at the MMT twenty years ago.  At that time, I saw the value of an all sky camera beyond what at the time was seen to be mearly a way of checking for clouds without having to go outside.

The MMTO has continued to run its all sky camera for many many years, and they've even developed a simple user interface to grab the data, which is stored in FITS format -- perfect for doing science.

In the past, I've poked around with satellite and meteor detection with some good results, but nothing conclusive because I never came up with an overall plan.  There's still value in these projects -- I just need to come up with an actual project design.

Recently I've decided to go back to the MMTO all sky camera data -- once again without an actual plan --  and see if I could measure variable stars.  The one that instantly came to mind was Algol.  This is an eclipsing system in which star B passes in front of star A every 2.867 days, with the entire eclipse event taking about 10 hours.

So here's what I have to work with:

A typical MMTO All Sky Camera view

and here it is zoomed in on Algol:

Zoomed in on Algol and surrounding stars

So I've written some software to do simple aperture photometry on Algol and Gamma And and then show their relative photometry.

This data, as you can probably tell, is very noisy and pretty poor.  Maybe this small project will motivate me to get ahold of the MMTO and see if I can work with them on improving their system.

In any case, the photometric results are also noisy, but show some promise.  The following is a plot showing relative brightness on the vertical axis, and UT time (show in hours before and after 21 Nov 2014) on the horizontal axis.

Relative Photometry for three consecutive evenings

The photmetry is shown for three contiguous nights: 20, 21, and 22 November 2014 (red, green, blue, respectively).   A value of '1' on the vertical axis says that Algol and the comparison star (Gamma And) were the same brightness.  A value larger than 1 means that Algol is brighter, and a value less than one means that Algol is fainter.  It was predicted that Algol would be at minimum on the 20th and 22nd.  Looking at the plots, it seems as though I was able to catch those events. But the data is so noisy and otherwise crappy that I'm not too sure yet.  I base this on the photometry for 21 Nov, which should be a pretty flat line and isn't.  There is an auto-gain on this camera so maybe that's what's making the data appear so non-flat.

In any case, this is sorta fun and I'm going to work on this a bit more to see if I can improve the measurements and maybe see if I can make those "non-event" evenings look at a little more flat photometrically.

Latest Podcasts And Camera Update

My latest Apogee Podcast is out over at 365DaysOfAstronomy.  I call this one "3D Mapping of Rings and Bubbles In Orion".

 

I also continue to do my daily "Jupiter Today" podcast, which you can watch here.  I've come up with a couple ideas for additional videos to begin going into more detail about the information I present in the podcast.  I still have no idea where this project is going, except that it's keeping the Jupiter system in the forefront of my mind.  The primary goal is to create a network of telescopes that will constantly monitor Jupiter.

It's been cloudy or otherwise overcast here for the past two weeks so I haven't been able to get out and work a little more with my new camera.  I'm looking forward to getting some research done with this thing, but of course the clouds need to cooperate.  I realized after I'd put the eyepiece barrel on the camera that I needed to take the lens out of the camera.  So with a little careful surgery, that's been done and before the clouds came I did confirm that I was able to get images through my scope.