Sep 26 2010 Last Wednesday morning just before dawn the Moon and
Jupiter were side by side in the western sky, bright and
unmistakeable. Jupiter vies with Venus to be the second
brightest nighttime object. Last Wednesday I think he won. I
checked him with my binoculars and saw three of his four
Galilean moons. The moons of Jupiter changed our view of the
universe. In 1609 Galileo made improvements to the telescope
invented in the Netherlands the year before. Once he had
something that cool to look through he checked the sky. I can
imagine his amazement to see Jupiter so well and to discover
four tiny dots around it. Every night the dots changed position.
What could they be? Jupiter’s moons and papal politics got
Galileo in trouble and eventually put him under house arrest.
The moons proved there were celestial objects that did not
revolve around the Earth, thus disproving the Catholic Church’s
geocentric doctrine that the Earth was the center of the
universe. Galileo wrote several papers publicly supporting C