Few of us think of a planets as much more than rocks n space, round, with orbits around a sun. Jupiter, our largest planet needed just a little more mass to be a star. But what is mass?
Mass on earth is easy to figure out. Simply weigh it. Because gravity is even, when one thing weighs more, it has more mass. Size has nothing to do with it. If you blow up a balloon to be larger than your brother's head, Martin's head will still weigh more. So when we talk about Jupiter needing a little more mass, if it was eighty times more dense, it would have had enough of the stuff to make it a solar system.
At last count, Jupiter has 49 moons. Galileo, who discovered it using a primitive telescope thought the moons he saw were stars. (Here is a list of the names of Jupiter's moons) As cool as it looks, it would not be a very nice place to visit. The gravity would squash you. It is 20,000 times that of earth!
Made up of ammonia gas and beneath that hydrogen that, because of that gravity, has turned to liquid. And deep inside Jupiter, at the very center is a solid core. In fact, the core of Jupiter is one big, earth sized magnet.
One of its moons, Io, is the most volcanically active objects in our solar system. Ganymede is also the largest moon in our solar system. 
I hope you get to see it.
Here are some other things you should be looking for on a clear night during the month of May.
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