Five Moons in One Frame, Thanks to a Lunar Pass
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for 12 October asks how many moons you can see. The best answer is five: four orbiting Jupiter, plus our own Moon orbiting Earth.
The multi-moon picture was possible because Earth's Moon moved directly in front of Jupiter last week. The featured image is a series of exposures taken near that alignment from Westchester, New York — one crescent of Moon and four Jovian satellites sharing a frame.
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The four points of light above our Moon, listed from bottom to top, are Jupiter's Galilean satellites: Ganymede, Io, Callisto and Europa.
Worth keeping in mind how large those four dots really are: Callisto, Ganymede and Io are each bigger than Earth's Moon, and Europa is only slightly smaller.
And they're not just distant ornaments — NASA's Juno spacecraft is currently orbiting Jupiter and has made close passes near three of them.