Fishing for Planets

It has been a while since we dragged out the telescope and since the view is definitely more panoramic from my parents' home, we hauled the scope and tripod over there for a visit under the stars starting with a feast of fish, wild rice, and coleslaw, with tomato and cucumber slices. Then we trekked outside, aiming the scope west, pointed toward the two bright spots in the sky.


Since we didn't do our research before looking at the close-together planets, we weren't entirely sure what we were about to scope out, but we had our tackle box with us complete with a flashlight, a few lenses, and a camera. Time to go planet fishing. We tossed a line into a sea of stars.

First we found the seemingly smaller of the two planets and since we could visibly see four smaller satellites around the planet, we knew the planet was Jupiter. Jupiter has 16 larger "moons" (but really 63 altogether) and we could see four of them through the telescope.

So what was the mysterious bright planet? We threw out our line into space a little to the right of Jupiter to hunt for the brightest point in the sky that night. Turns out it was lovely Venus.

We gazed deeper into the heavens until the apple pie in the kitchen called us away from the shores of the stars.

Star-struck,
Dawn