April 1, 2009
galileos telescopes were not of high quality by modern standards. he was able to see the moons of jupiter?
Can you answer Alexia A's question about Binoculars?:
galileos telescopes were not of high quality by modern standards. he was able to see the moons of jupiter, but he never reported seeing features on mars. use a small angle formula to find the angular diameter of mars when it is closest to the earth. how does it compare to the maximum diameter of jupiter?
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Comments on galileos telescopes were not of high quality by modern standards. he was able to see the moons of jupiter? »
Your question makes no sense….
Peace for all!
The four Galilean moons are luminous points of light and can be seen with a very poor quality telescope. My physics students built Galilean 'scopes with $1 cheap glass lenses glued into $2 mailing tubes. The first thing they noticed was the lack of contrast and clarity in the images. This may partially explain why four luminous points of light could be seen (they are of very high contrast to the black background sky) but not features on Mars.
In terms of the small angle approximation:
In astronomy, the angle subtended by the image of a distant object is often only a few arcseconds, so it is well suited to the small angle approximation. The linear size (D) is related to the angular size (X) and the distance from the observer (d) by the simple formula
D = X ยท d / 206,265
where X is measured in arcseconds.
The distance from Earth to Mars varies considerably from 36 to 250 million miles. 57,936,384 to 402,336,000 kilometres. This variation is the greatest of all the planets.
For Jupiter:
Distance from Earth
Minimum (10^6 km) 588.5
Maximum (10^6 km) 968.1
And for radii:
Mars Radius: (km)
Equatorial 3,396.2
Polar 3,376.2
Jupiter Radius (1 bar level) (km)
Equatorial 71,492
Polar 66,854