ICYMI: Incredible Video Shows Super Rare Triple Moon Eclipse
"The day I have been waiting for all year has finally come."
If you consider yourself a bit of an amateur weird sky enthusiast, you are definitely going to want to check out this rad as hell video of three of Jupiter’s moons — Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — causing a rare triple eclipse on the planet’s surface as they crossed paths at around the same time.
Amateur astronomer Christopher Go tracked the entire experience on his blog and took high-quality photos of Jupiter and the moons at around midnight on August 15 from the Philippines.
“The day I have been waiting for all year has finally come,” Go wrote. “Today we had a grand slam event. A very rare triple transit on Jupiter with the moons Callisto, Ganymede and Europa in transit.”
Kunio Sayanagi, a planetary scientist at Hampton University, took Go’s images and was able to compile them into a totally awesome video of the moons swirling around the planet’s surface.
Each second in the video represents 30 minutes of real-time, so it looks like the moons are moving much quicker than they are. Sayangi told Insider that thanks to Go’s documentation, he was able to make “the best movie ever made of Jupiter’s triple transit event.”
If you are reading this from the surface of Jupiter, first of all, greetings from planet Earth! But also, you would have experienced a solar eclipse. However, if you are one of our Earth readers, this space occurrence of moons passing between us and a planet is commonly referred to in the astronomy community as a “transit.”
While transits are relatively common on Jupiter due to its hundreds of moons, the triple transit is an extremely rare occurrence. According to experts, the next transit is not expected to happen until 2032, so this is the best look we are going to get for a very long time.
