Jupiter: Sept 15, 2010 0620-0714 UTC and Bonus

I was going to skip Jupiter tonight for when I glanced and the Jupiter moon thingy, I noticed that not all the moons were visible.
If you open up the moon thingy, you see there is a scripted window on the the bottom that lists stuff that's going on with the moons.
(Edit: whoops! forgot to link the Jupiter thingy, here.)
Well, it seems Io was occulted by Jupiter, but was going to make a reappearance in around a half hour.
So I set up the telescope and get this image at around 0620 UTC:



Let me identify the moons for you:



Ganymede, our featured moon for tonight has the second farthest orbit.
Callisto, is close to Jupiter in the image because we are seeing it straight on; it actually has the largest orbit. It's almost hidden by the glare of the planet.
Europa, which we'll get to later, is out to the right.
Io of course, is behind Jupiter.
NFL! Which if you play professional football means "not for long."
So I wait a bit, actually I processed the early images, then I go back and see what I can get:




Totally awesome!
Well, for me anyways. I sort of saw Io come out from behind Jupiter, in between passing clouds that is. The image in the telescope is way sharper than what I can capture on the camera so it was pretty cool to catch Io coming around the bend, so to speak.
By the way, I believe it was observing the orbits of the Jovian moons that convinced Galileo that the solar system was heliocentric, or that the planets went around the sun.
Okay, so Ganymede:



Thank you to the NOAA for that image.
Ganymede is the largest of the Galilean moons(and the largest satellite in the solar system, Saturn's Titan is No.2) and like Callisto is probably all ice. Well, it does have a core of iron, like Earth, but most of it is frozen stuff.
Not exactly a tropical getaway.
Unlike the other Galilean moons, Ganymede is named after a dude who, and this gets a bit funky, apparently had a thing with Zeus.
It orbits Jupiter about once every 7.1 days.
What about the bonus?
Huh? oh yes, the bonus!
Well, it seems that Jupiter is not the only planet visible in that part of the sky. I read the other night that Uranus lurks nearby!
So, I looked for a blueish thingy and this is what I found:



Not a very good image I know, but I wasn't sure what I was looking at without verifying on a star chart. It was the only blue thingy around so I think it's Uranus. I'll double check it against a chart later.
Anyways, if you got a decent pair of binoculars, you can probably see it too.
Okay, Jupiter factoid:
Jupiter's core is thought to be about five times hotter than Earth's.