Double Shadow Transit Season for the Jovian Moons Begins

Watching the inky-black shadow of a Jovian moon slide across the cloud-tops of Jupiter is an unforgettable sight. Two is always better than one, and as the largest planet in our solar system heads towards opposition on March 8th, so begins the first of two seasons of double shadow transits for 2016. With an orbit of 1.8 days, shadow transits of the innermost Galilean moon Io are by far the most common. The innermost three large moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa and Ganymede) are in a 1:2:4 resonance,...