Jupiter has been my favourite planet to observe ever since I had a pair of binoculars. After getting my first telescope, I started to observe transits and look for the Great Red Spot (GRS) as well as all the other events that can be seen on this planet. I caught the double shadow transit in progress the other night and was quite annoyed with myself that I had been caught unawares. To ensure this wouldn?t happen again, I entered all the Galilean moon transits as well as GRS transits for the month of April into my Outlook calendar.

When I switched the view in Outlook to monthly and scanned the entire month, I noticed a peculiar pattern. Early every Friday morning in April, Io and her shadow will be transiting Jupiter. Interesting in itself, but the extraordinary part is the GRS will be transiting or at least prominent on Jupiter during each of these events!

Io will be crossing the northern hemisphere for each and so will not cross the GRS but will still give lots of pretty photo-ops I am sure.

Just what the world needed; another reason not to go to work on Fridays!