Io, Ganymede, Europa and Callisto...

...these are the four moons of Jupiter that H and I saw through an excellent telescope in a parking lot in Joshua Tree National Park. H and I were getting ready to take photos of the sunset one evening, in the same car park there were two guys, Charles and Frank, setting up the most amazing array of telescopes I've ever seen. There were 5 scopes ranging in size and sophistication, two were computer controlled and tracked the objects automatically. We chatted briefly with Charles and Frank before the sun wondering what they were upto. It turns out they are amateur astronomers who came out once a month when the moon is below the horizon to see what they could see. They kindly invited us back to check out the night sky when it was dark. We returned at about 9:30pm and Charles, the more senior of the two launched into an introduction of the night sky with a cool laser pen pointing out any number of constellations and planets, it was excellent. They lined up some of the bigger scopes on Jupiter and we could see three storm bands on the planet and all four large moons. We also got a quick glimpse of the rings of Saturn which was a little wobbly as it was low in the sky and suffered from atmospheric distortion. We also saw a number of nebular clusters, large groups of stars, far out on the edge of the galaxy. We also saw the ring nebular and any number of other cool things. The guys were really nice and talked us through what we were looking at. What a great evening. They were staying up all night to see everything that was to be seen but we bailed at about 11:30pm tired to get some sleep.