Watching Jupiter Last Night

Tonight we had a very clear night here in The Netherlands and I had read on a website that Jupiter was very close to the Earth at the moment and that you could spot it as a non flickering bright star on the horizon. I talked to the kids about this and asked them if they wanted to see this planet more closely. And they were enthusiastic to my surprise actually. So we drove to a place tonight were some amateur astronomers had put up their telescopes and we watched Jupiter up close. It was really amazing to see this for real. I mean I've seen pictures on the Internet of course but it is so much greater to see it with your own eyes. You could even see 4 of the 63 moons that Jupiter has. The kids were very exciting about all this and they are going to tell all about it on school on Monday. We decided that we would go out more and do some planet and star gazing in the future. The next thing would be to visit a real observatory and look through a really big telescope I guess. I just wanted to share this with you because you might want to have a look at this amazing sight yourself!