Big Kid Science

As explained in the Big Kid Boxes on p. 4-5 of Max Goes to Jupiter, Jupiter is often easy to see in the night sky. Many web sites provide information about whether and where to find Jupiter and other planets in the night sky; here are some that are particularly easy to use:

Astronomy Magazine's Tonight's Sky applet: This simple applet appears in the upper right corner of its web page; just click on the tab labeled "Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn" to see whether Jupiter is visible and the time at which it rises and sets.

Night Sky Info — Jupiter: This wonderful page, created by a young man in Romania, shows exactly where Jupiter is currently located among the constellations. Highly recommended! The main Night Sky Info page is also quite nice, and has a lot more information about what you can see in the sky.

Note: On the above and other astronomy sites, you may sometimes see paid advertisements for horoscopes or other aspects of astrology. Be sure that you don't confuse astrology with astronomy; although the two words sound much the same — and were often practiced by the same people in ancient times — they have very different meanings today. Astronomy is the science by which we learn about planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe. Astrology arises from ancient superstitions that held that the movements of the planets among the stars of the zodiac could affect our lives. We now know that the planets are too far away to have any gravitational influence on our lives, and tests of the predictions made by astrology show that these predictions come true no more often than would be expected by pure chance. We should not be surprised that astrology doesn't work. After all, ancient people came up with the ideas of astrology at a time when they thought that Jupiter and the other planets really did move among the constellations, but we now know that is not the case: The planets orbit our Sun, while the stars are other "suns" that are incredibly far away compared to the planets. Moreover, ancient people also assumed that the patterns we see in the constellations had meaning, but we now know that these patterns are illusions that we see from Earth only because we lack depth perception when we look into space; in many cases, the stars that make up the patterns of a constellation are nowhere near each other in reality, because some are much farther away from us than others. This idea is shown with an applet that allows you to see the 3d positions of stars in constellations (for Leo and Scorpio); if you find other web-based applets that you think we might want to post for all readers, please let us know! (Click the contact link above.)