Io experiencing total solar eclipse

[kvanza]

First off, I just got Celestia earlier this morning and must say it's an excellent program.

Now... when I first start the program I get to see Io... (why choose Io as a starting point? Why not Earth?)

Anyways, I played around with it but the last few times I was starting it I noticed that Io was black... all over... (great... texture loading problems?) Turned out no such thing happened... I had just opened Celestia during a total solar eclipse of Io... Here's the details I found by playing with the time controls

Eclipse started about 18:05:00 UTC
Total Eclipse at about 18:08:42 UTC

Total Eclipse begins to end at about 20:15:11
Io no longer in eclipse at about 20:19:00

So as you can see you only have about 25 minutes to check this out... or go back in time to see it... Really cool!!

[Sgt Sanity]

Actually, you can easily search for eclipses. For example, lets just say you wanted to find all IO eclipses. You'd go in the menus "Navigation -> Eclipse Finder". Set it from "Solar" to "Moon" and from "Earth" to "Jupiter". Then, since there are tons of moons around Jupiter, you might want to shorten the date range by a lot, or else it'll take forever computing tons of different eclipses. So, set the parameters from "01 April 2003" to "01 June 2003". Then, click compute.

Now, select one of the Io eclipses. You can organize it by an attribute, by clicking on the attribute name at the top. But for now, we'll just select one of the eclipses by clicking on it. Now, click the button "Set Date and go to Planet". You'll see a real eclipse.

[Paul]

Although I'm sure it was a pleasant surprise to encounter Io during a total solar eclipse, perhaps it wasn't so amazing a thing. I mean, Jupiter has the biggest shadow in the Solar System, and Io has the quickest orbit of the Galilean satellites... so doesn't that mean that Io has the second highest frequency of total solar eclipses of any body? Amalthea being the highest, that is.

Cheers,
Paul

[Ynjevi]

Well, in fact Metis is even faster: it orbits Jupiter every about 7 hours, even faster than the planet rotates.