Re: Jupiter's GRS detection at 54x
- From: brian@xxxxxxx (Brian Tung)
- Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 17:08:03 +0000 (UTC)
jtaylor wrote:
> Shouldn't this be a calculable thing?
>
> Size of image versus the eye's resolving power?
Not necessarily. One issue is that you're not trying to resolve it--only
detect it. A second issue is that the contrast between the GRS and the
rest of Jupiter is fairly low--considerably lower than, say, the Cassini
division and the rest of Saturn's rings.
Those two issues push the required magnification in different directions.
If the contrast were sufficiently high, you wouldn't need very high
magnification at all--consider that a shadow transit can be seen at
fairly low powers, and those are quite a bit smaller than the GRS. But
the contrast is low--low enough that in poor seeing it can be entirely
invisible. For that reason, the minimum magnification is an indication
not only of your visual acuity, but of your telescope's aperture, its
quality, and your local observing conditions as well.
Brian Tung <brian@xxxxxxx>
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
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