This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Some natural phenomena need few words to explain why they're fascinating. Eclipses, transits, and phases in astronomy tend to fall into that category. Here's a stunning sequence of images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 showing the triple conjunction and transit of the large Jovian moons Europa, Callisto, and Io over some 42 minutes in January 2015.
Jupiter of course has a lot of moons, 67 confirmed ones in fact. Some of these smaller ones were in on the act too, they're just too small to notice easily. Here's a guide to the position of 2 others - Thebe and Amalthea.
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So in fact this was a quintuple conjunction event!
And finally, in animated form.