auntblabby wrote:
who here wants to go to the moon and mars and beyond?
I'm holding out for a trip to the Galilean moons...
I read Arthur C. Clarke's sequels to "2001- a Space Odyssey" as a kid, and was blown away by the idea that Jupiter has four pretty substantial worlds orbiting it. Then I was given a copy of the "Guinness Book of Astronomy", which actually had maps of a couple of dozen major moons. Turns out every moon has a lot of distinctive character, and the four Galileans more than most. Sulphur-yellow Io with volcanoes and geysers, smooth Europa like a cracked cue-ball, planet-sized Ganymede with strange curved dark shapes all across it, and the thousands of glittering ice craters on Callisto.
And I've actually seen them. A few years back, Jupiter was really bright in the autumn, so I used to go out in the back yard with binoculars. Just a blurry bright disk with four tiny stars to either side of it in an eerily straight line, but in one stroke I'd quintupled the number of moons I've ever seen. If I had the patience and observation skills to chart their movements, I could have retraced Galileo's proof that not everything orbits the Earth.
Yes, I'm a bit cynical about the political motivations behind the space race. But personally I don't think we've landed on /enough/ moons yet.
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You're so vain
I bet you think this sig is about you