Hi folks! David and I are two astrophysicists, and we put together this documentary taking you along with us as we tried to reproduce what Galileo saw when he first discovered the moons of Jupiter, forever changing our perception of the Universe.
We went through his notes and built an engine in Python to digest his handwritten diagrams of the Jovian system, and built a simulation of Jupiter’s moons to identify what phase of the orbital cycle he observed. We then propagated the simulation into the future, and identified a night coming up that had the same configuration of moon positions as his big discovery. Then we went out ourselves, and captured a 3-hour timelapse of Jupiter and its moons as they aligned themselves just as they had for Galileo, over 400 years ago!
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Hi folks! David and I are two astrophysicists, and we put together this documentary taking you along with us as we tried to reproduce what Galileo saw when he first discovered the moons of Jupiter, forever changing our perception of the Universe.
We went through his notes and built an engine in Python to digest his handwritten diagrams of the Jovian system, and built a simulation of Jupiter’s moons to identify what phase of the orbital cycle he observed. We then propagated the simulation into the future, and identified a night coming up that had the same configuration of moon positions as his big discovery. Then we went out ourselves, and captured a 3-hour timelapse of Jupiter and its moons as they aligned themselves just as they had for Galileo, over 400 years ago!