A couple of weekends ago, I went to Astroport Hotel in Sariska, Rajasthan. It was my first experience with star gazing. I was amazed by the beauty of the night sky. I could see the moon, the rings of Saturn and Jupiter along with three of its moons. It was a surreal experience. One more amazing thing I saw was a binary star called Albireo. It was a beautiful sight to see two stars of different colors so close to each other.
Today I thought I would do a bit of research on a few of the things that folks there told me about. The first thing I want to learn is what exactly is a binary star.
- Binary Star
- Jupiter
- I was able to see the two prominent dark bands quite clearly. The bands are called the North Equatorial Belt and the South Equatorial Belt. source
- I was also able to see three of its moons. There are more than 60 known moons of Jupiter!! source
- I came across this video which talks about a NASA mission to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Really interesting and felt happy that I understood a bit about it because of the book I mentioned above. The European Space Agency also has a mission to study Jupiter and it’s Icy moons called JUICE.
- Saturn
- I was able to see the rings of Saturn.
- A while back I read a tech book which teaches Postgres using actual NASA mission about Saturn and its moons. Nice book, would highly recommend it.
- Moon I was able to see the Apollo 11 landing site, Sea of Tranquility.
Planning to learn a bunch of stuff about space, moved it here