Post-Christmas day observations

As an update to yesterday's post we'd like to share our photos from today's attempt at capturing the Moon and Jupiter. In addition, we managed to catch a speck of light known as Aldebaran, a rather bright red giant star some 65 light years (that's 614.9 million million kilometres) from us.

Beginning with the Moon again - 

                                                    

Today's observation of Jupiter and its moons displays the three closest moons forming a skewed triangle  of sorts. Callisto, the fourth and farthest Galilean moon can be seen as a faint dot away from the trio. 

Jupiter + 4 Galilean moons

The diagram below (screen capture from Sky & Telescope's handy Jupiter applet) indicates the predicted position of the Galilean moons with respect to the giant planet. As before the letters denote each moon's name:

I = Io, E = Europa, G = Ganymede, C = Callisto 

 Our final image of the day was a capture of Aldebaran (from the Arabic, Al-debaran, 'the follower').

Aldebaran (Red giant star)

Since we were unable to capture a wide angle image of our objects of interest, we've included a screen shot from Stellarium (a free to download interactive planetarium) illustrating the relative positions of all three objects. 

Equipment list: Celestron NexStar 6SE - Stock setup (25mm Plossl eyepiece and a wonky StarFinder) // Imaging - Samsung Galaxy S3

Who: Ayushi/Rajat/Kashif

When: 1800 hrs, 26th Dec, 2012