Iphone captures 17th century vision

AN AMATEUR ASTRONOMER in Arizona has used his Iphone to take a snap of Jupiter and its Galilean moons.

Ok, you can't see Jupiter and its moons with the naked eye, so Michael Weasner wired up his Jesus phone to a Meade catadioptric telescope.

To get the snap Weasner used the afocal technique with a 2x Barlow lens, a 15 mm eyepiece, and a lunar filter, to reduce the brightness slightly. In fact the only thing lo tech in the operation was the iphone which was only the 2G version.

The snap showed three of the four "Galilean" moons of Jupiter, Ganymede, Io, Europa. A few of Jupiter's cloud bands can be seen in the photo.

However for all this technology, the picture is exactly what the 17th century astronomer Galileo saw through his telescope in 1610.

Galileo was not as smug about it as an Iphone user would be and got into a bit of hot water for showing off the fruits of his researches.

Unfortunately Iphone users can no longer be persecuted by the Pope, locked up and make to recant their Coldplay collections.

Who would have thought that we would have a reason to look fondly back to the days of the religious inquisition? Galileo was locked up for saying that the world went round the sun. It would be nice if we could lock someone up for saying that the sun shines out of Steve Jobs' rear end instead.µ

L'Inq
MacObserver