Talk:Solar eclipses on Jupiter
 | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||
.jpg){kind=small}
The old version of the last paragraph confused solar eclipses (shadow transits) with satellite eclipses. It read
“Shadow transits have been observed since the time of Galileo, and predicted times for these events date to the mid Seventeenth Century. It was soon noticed that predicted times differed from observed times in a regular way, varying from up to ten minutes early to up to ten minutes late. The Danish astronomer Ole Roemer used these errors to make the first accurate determination of the speed of light, correctly realizing the variations were caused by the varying distance between Earth and Jupiter as the two planets moved in their orbits around the Sun.”
The Wiki reference to Ole Roemer clearly indicates that the events were satellite eclipses and not solar eclipses (shadow transits). Indeed, the shadow transits could not have been timed with sufficient accuracy to measure the speed of light.WikiRendu (talk) 18:18, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Eclipses between moons of Jupiter[edit]
I hadn't heard about this possibility, some pictures here[1], apparently occur every 6 years when the earth passes through the equatorial plane of Jupiter. Tom Ruen (talk) 21:58, 13 January 2015 (UTC)
Amalthea[edit]
The claim that Amalthea can fully occult the sun has been present in this article since its creation in 2005, but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect.
Even if we assumed Amalthea were perfectly round, a diameter of 167 km and a semi-major axis of 181000 km gives an angular diameter of 191 arc-seconds. Granted, that's measuring from the core rather than the atmosphere, but even subtracting Jupiter's 70000 km radius, the distance to Amalthea is still 111000 km, which gives an angular diameter of 310 arc-seconds—still substantially less than the 372 arc-seconds necessary to eclipse the sun.
I haven't removed the claim, since it's been here through nineteen years of editing by people more knowledgeable about this than myself, and I don't know where it was originally sourced from. But for now I've added a citation-needed flag. Kara Paravel (talk) 21:06, 6 February 2024 (UTC)