I'm surprised we haven't seen more hard sci-fi in the jovian or cronian systems. While constant 1g acceleration drives open the whole solar system to the ~month travel time that benefits stories, much more realistic accelerations (or limited fuel) can still manage the same within those systems. Add to that the plethora of interesting moons, rings, and gravitational points to focus people and material around and the action should flow quite naturally.
I'm surprised we haven't seen more hard sci-fi in the jovian or cronian systems. While constant 1g acceleration drives open the whole solar system to the ~month travel time that benefits stories, much more realistic accelerations (or limited fuel) can still manage the same within those systems.
If an entire Sci-fi continuity were limited to just Sol and Alpha Centauri, this by itself would constitute an inexhaustible number of potential settings. In addition to planets, moons, asteroids, dwarf planets, Oort cloud and Kuiper belt class objects, there could also be space stations numbering in the tens of millions. Such a setting could use known physics, yet be incredibly vast. The Expanse is going in this direction, but doesn't go that far, and doesn't stick to known physics. (Though it remains closer to it than almost all Sci-fi continuities out there.)
> If an entire Sci-fi continuity were limited to just Sol and Alpha Centauri, this by itself would constitute an inexhaustible number of potential settings.
"Saturn's Children" by Charles Stross is a good one (unfortunately he had to do away with humans to keep the space opera physically realistic).
Mostly humans with radiation repair nanomachines and shielding could do just fine, I think. (Saying more would spoil Saturn's Children.) Humans commanding autonomous drones should figure more into Sci-fi. "Away teams" of drones in real life space fleets should be more prominent. Instead of a transporter shifting bodies, we could have the shifting of points of view through VR teleoperation. (Which is really what a transporter was for in the original Star Trek series: Changing locations with minimal production expense.)
... the TV series is now on Amazon Prime, with future seasons coming.
Fortunately Amazon took it. If after three seasons of slow development it ended where we start to see answers, I would have considered it a scam. Not so insulting as Gallactica, but definitely annoying.
I think it is because aliens are more interesting than moons. Anyways, Expanse is amazing, I hope they improve for the last book in the series. Tiamat's Wrath was not the best.
There is a comment on the site that the Galilean Moons of Jupiter can be seen with the naked eye under dark skies. I've known people who might have eyes good enough to do that, but for the rest of us even a modest pair of binoculars is enough. To me, it's one of the funnest things you can view in the northern hemisphere without getting out more serious equipment. (Another would be the Orion nebula. If you can set the exposure on your camera, you can even photograph it, although without tracking it'll be blurry.)
The Galilean moons are hard to see with the naked eye because the light from Jupiter is overwhelming. It is much easier if you use a distant object like a lightpost to just barely block out Jupiter.
Try viewing the jovian moons in winter when the atmoshpere is stable.
Try with binoculars first to see where the moons are then try to focus your eyes on the system without the binocs.
My eyes are terrible but I see those moons every winter
To see the red spot you will need a telescope.
To see it for more than a few seconds you will need an expensive telescope hopefully with auto tracking and the red spot must be in view
When I was a young boy a person showed me the rings of Saturn and it blew my mind.
I've since bought tools to help me see not only Saturn's rings but to study the Cassini divisions separating the rings
There are all kinds of cool stuff overhead
Wasn't Galileo first to observe them with his telescope or were they mentioned somewhere before? I assume back then the skies were darker and people probably had better eyes so if they are observable I would assume somebody would have mentioned them.
2. The moons aren't always visible (they're behind or crossing Jupiter).
3. The magnitude of the moons changes with the relative positions of Earth and Jupiter.
It's possible that Galileo was not the first to see them, but if you don't know what they are or how you managed to see them, you're probably not going to be able to get anyone else to believe you. The telescope allowed Galileo to track their movement and also to convince others, who could also look through a telescope and see them easily.
If you want to play with this data, it's available in various formats [1]
I happened to use this last week because we needed test data for a community tree in an app we're building. There are nine communities, and we needed test cases with 0, 1, and many subcommunities. This not only provided ready test cases, but the team is learning celestial facts while working on the feature!
It's interesting to note that there is no well-defined lower limit on the size of what can be called a moon. So I can call a dust particle a moon as well.
Whenever people say they were born too late to explore the earth or too young to explore space i dont understand it. Something like 90% of the objects in our solar system have been discovered in the last ~15 years. There's tons more out there. Sure the major planets and their moons are here, but you scroll to the bottom of this list there's unconfirmed dwarf planets. And likely moons of them as well
And finally, you have 624 Hektor, which is a Trojan of Jupiter (stable solar orbit near Jupiter's L4 Lagrange point), that is a a likely contact binary that has a moon. So it's orbiting the Sun, while "orbiting" Jupiter's L4 point, while all 3 components (the two halves of the contact binary, and their moon) orbit the center of mass of their own little 'Hector system'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/624_Hektor
It's theoretically possible, but not likely. The Earth-Moon-Sun system is fairly stable because the Earth and Moon are relatively far away from the Sun and everything else. When we put a satellite in orbit around the moon, the gravity of the Earth is much greater when the satellite is on the Earth's side, and much weaker when it's on the other side of the Moon. Those forces destabilize the orbit rather quickly and corrections have to be made using fuel.
If the Moon were much further away, the Moon could have a moon of its own. But the further away it gets from the Earth, the more likely it is to be influenced by other objects like other planets or the Sun.
See The Expanse Season 2 (it's amazing).