Cool, there are some moons that show up in the 2008-2009.

I count a total of 4 moons seen throughout the moving series, but I am guessing it could be the same moons showing up in different areas.

It looks like they appear in the 2009 frame.

Oh, & if you look at the montage you can see them as well in the top 2. Though in the montage it appears there is one moon missing on the top most picture off the left side of its rings…which does show up in the animated series though.

Cool observation.

Er .. the BA’s already blogged on Kepler-16 b a couple of days ago. Did you miss it?

Click on my name here for the link or cut’n'paste :

Astronomers discover a wretched hive of scum and villainy

into the search box. The BA posted that on the 15th of September 2011 at 12:04 PM.

Thanks BA & Alan Friedman for creating and sharing that – marvellous.

BTW. What are the moons that pop up in some of the shots towards the end? There’s two appearing just above the rings circa the 2007-8~ish mark then a brightish one on the diagonal on right and a smaller fainter one diagonal on the left in line with the rings on the left in the final shot. Unless I just need to clean my monitor more but I don’t think it’s dust motes!

I have seen all three of these levels of detail in a piddling little 65mm telescope, however, at over 100x magnification. They show up unmistakably, but you do need those high-powered eyepieces. I’m going to go ahead and assume no one here has 100x binoculars; even 20x binoculars didn’t unambiguously resolve disk/ring details for me.

Oh, and I see planetary features just fine from light pollution. Urban areas make faint fuzzies difficult, but there’s no city that can glare out Jupiter and Saturn.

I’ll have to try viewing at different times of the day to see what is up.

Clear skies, Alan

“Why does Saturn’s shadow seem to disappear in the third-to-last image of the montage?”

Because Saturn was then directly opposite the Sun in the sky. i.e. The Sun, Earth and Saturn were all in a straight line.

… Except upside-down for some reason. (or maybe it’s the animation that’s upside-down…)

Now about Jupiter… Personally I've never been able to make out the cloud bands with my 7×50 binoculars. The Galilean moons, sure those are easy, but even in dark and clear skies I haven't seen bands. Maybe it's because whenever I'm in those conditions, there are actual telescopes to look through so I just haven't tried that hard… But I have looked at Jupiter quite a bit at home where the light pollution is too heavy for deep sky objects but not that bad, and never seen bands.

My point being… don't get your hopes up too much about seeing all the awesomeness that is Jupiter through binos. It's still pretty cool!

AWESOME.

Tilt your head a bit to the right (so that the planets are “horizontal” in your field of vision) and look “through” the picture as you would with a Magic Eye poster. The planets will then show up in 3D!