YT: Jupiter rotates once every 8 or so hours, and some of its moons hammer round too!
The Earth rotates every 24 hrs, and its possible to get 8+ hrs of darkness.
It is possible, under favorable conditions (now (Summer 2009) is not a bad time) to see an entire rotation of Jupiter in one night!
This is a time lapse of me trying to get a timelapse of an entire rotation of Jupiter.
Few people realize just how visible the planets are, with Jupiter appearing as a bright star. Similarly Mercury, Venus, Mars and Saturn are all easily visible to the naked eye. Indeed the angular size of Venus (at its largest) and Jupiter is such that they are only just not visible as disks with the naked eye.
This video hopefully not only shows how accessible things like Jupiter are in even modest instruments (almost everything will show Jupiter as a banded disk, and the four main moons), but also links the timescales on which things happen on Earth to whats happening (the planet spinning and the moons orbiting) on Jupiter.
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