by Jamie Dillon
While the worthies were at MB and up at LS, I was in BY. Seeing out back was 3/5, moderate, transparency was 4.8 at zenith. Needed averted vision to see the Beehive overhead. It was nice and cold too, mid-20's. Took a scenic tour, including beta Mon and sigma Ori, which both looked pretty good. The Trap showed 5 stars direct at 210x, with the F star wavering ca 40% of the time.
Beta Monoceroti is a knockout triple star, which should be around the top of anyone's must-see list. From any dark site it'll show gorgeous colors, along with its arresting geometry.
Anyway, the reason I'm posting this is Jupiter, which was looking good, also at 210x, with the Galileans all marching off to the West in a row. 3rd time I swung over to Jupiter it occurred why I made sure to be out back this night. The Galileo craft was making its last pass by a Galilean moon. We went online for the first time around Hallowe'en '95, just over a month before Galileo got to Jupiter. From a few column inches in the occasional story, here were hundreds of pages of rich details.
That feisty ship has been part of my life on a weekly and often a daily basis since then. I thoroughly associate Ron Baalke's Galileo updates with being online. Seeing Jupiter's moons with binocs out the back door was a step on the slippery slope to the life of telescopes. And here was Io swinging around Jupiter, with Galileo getting to 100 km above Io's surface.
Turns out the radiation fields caused a safing incident, and the whole closest encounter was wasted for the first time in all these 33 orbits over 6 years. Galileo is running out of hydrazine and wearing out. But what a fine career. There it was, somewhere impossibly close to Io from our vantage point.