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Jupiter

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naitaka

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http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/jupiter_dark_spot_031023.html

Astronomers have spotted a strange, obvious and inexplicable black spot near the equator of Jupiter. A picture of the object was circling this planet electronically this week as researchers scratched their heads about what they'd found...

...Jupiter's complex atmosphere is known to generate ephemeral spots, whirls and cloud formations of various sorts. Many are colorful; often they are bright, sometimes they are dark. This one is particularly dark and larger than many seen in the past.

The first picture of the black spot to circulate among astronomers worldwide was taken Oct. 19 by astrophotographer Olivier Meeckers. The image gained wider attention Wednesday as it was mentioned in astronomy newsletters. It had experts captivated.

Meeckers, a member of Groupe Astronomie de Spa in Belgium, told SPACE.com he does not know what created the spot...

It is not known if the spot is purely an atmospheric phenomenon or if it might have been generated by some foreign object, though the latter possibility is doubted. In 1994, impacts of the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 created huge black scars in the Jovian atmosphere.

[with photos]
 
strange black monoliths anyone?

mines the spacesuit :D
 
'Its full of spots...'

It seems the equatorial spot wasn't the first (linked from the link posted by naitaka:-

Mysterious Dark Spot Seen Near Jupiter's Pole

Article with images removed
Mysterious Dark Spot Seen Near Jupiter's Pole
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 05:00 pm ET
13 March 2002


In catching up with Cassini spacecraft imagery that had not been fully studied, researchers have spotted a mysterious dark spot near Jupiter's north pole and watched it develop over the course of more than two months.

They don't know what it is. But they released an animation of the phenomenon Wednesday.

The spot is similar to Earth's so-called "ozone hole" in the sense that it originated near the pole and was confined to the polar region, said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Southwest Research Institute. But, like the ozone hole, the Jovian spot is probably not an actual hole.

"It's not a physical hole," Porco said in a telephone interview. "It's probably a chemical disturbance, in which new hydrocarbon haze particles are created by auroral energetics."

The Jovian polar spot was larger than Earth itself. It developed inside Jupiter's auroral oval, a region near the pole where colorful atmospheric lights are generated by the interaction of gases with electricity. The spot whirled like a vortex as it grew and stretched out over time, appearing on the verge of dissipation near the end of the observations.

The images were made between Oct. 1 and Dec. 15, 2000, as Cassini approached Jupiter. The spacecraft's view of the planet was not directly over the pole, so the animation was reconfigured to show the event as though the viewer were looking down on the polar region from directly above.

Closer to the pole, a second and smaller strange spot is seen developing about halfway through the animation.

"It's probably a similar phenomenon," Porco said of the smaller spot. But, she pointed out, scientists haven't figured out what the larger spot is or how it formed. Jupiter is a wild place, with storms of all sizes raging in its atmosphere. The largest, called the Great Red Spot, is south of Jupiter's equator and spans more than 15,000 miles.

"UV waves are shorter," Porco said. "They scatter easily." Hence, the gas above the visible clouds appears bright and mostly featureless in the ultraviolet, and the familiar bands of clouds in Jupiter's equatorial region are invisible, as can be seen in the outer perimeter of the new animation. Only the very highest haze appears dark against the bright background.

"But near the poles, you see structures," Porco said. She said the dark spots are most likely the manifestation of haze developing high in the atmosphere rather than below it, where the main cloud layers exist. A haze also covers Jupiter's Great Red Spot, making it appear dark.

Further examination of the images returned by Cassini, a NASA-operated robot, together with examination of the data from other Cassini instruments, will eventually shed light on the mysterious spot, Porco said.

Cassini is now on its way to Saturn, where its primary mission will begin in 2004.
Link to animation
Click to expand...
 
melf said:
strange black monoliths anyone?

mines the spacesuit :D
Click to expand...
No word of a lie. I tried to follow one of Hugo's links and an error message popped up. Then my computer said:

Originally quoted by Niles' computer
"This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has alway been due to human error"
Click to expand...
:eek!!!!:

No I'm not going to go outside and check you overgrown bucket of sand!
 
Niles Calder said:
No word of a lie. I tried to follow one of Hugo's links and an error message popped up. Then my computer said:

:eek!!!!:

No I'm not going to go outside and check you overgrown bucket of sand!
Click to expand...

shouldnt that be "you overgrown excuse of a abacus"?

or should that be "damn it hal!, im a astromoner not a astronaut" :D
 
Well seeing he's still running on silicone based processors I'll stick to sand...
 
Perhaps there could be an alien craft hiding within the atmoshpere of Jupiter. Apparently doing a piss poor job of it though.
 
It is quite simple, really; take a von neumann machine with the capacity to self-replicate from hydrogen, plonk it in the atmosphere of any Jupiter type planet;

as the Hydrogen is converted to heavier elements the density and internal pressure of the planet increases (although the mass remains the same);

first the Deuterium will start to fuse, then He3 and Tritium; you've got yourself a brown dwarf.
Then if the pressure and temperature continues to increase you will get proton fusion and you've got a star.
 
Philo, you're not trying...
you HAVE to get recent HAARP tests
and Chemtrails involved, as well! ;)

TVgeek

(..and lo and behold, Chemtrails did get involved, in a rather big way - so much so it's been split off and taken to a place of safety, so as we can continue discussing Jupiter and it's dark spot... Stu)
 
TVgeek said:
Philo, you're not trying...
you HAVE to get recent HAARP tests
and Chemtrails involved, as well! ;)

TVgeek
Click to expand...

I'm sure Ockham's razor's to blame...;)
 
TVgeek said:
Philo, you're not trying...
you HAVE to get recent HAARP tests
and Chemtrails involved, as well! ;)

TVgeek
Click to expand...

I am going to shirk responsibility for my slovenly lack of effort by pointing out that, to knowledgable observers :p, that was assumed!

Yith:
The spelling I was familiar with was 'Occam'. But after a quick google, I found that 'Ockham' was also an accepted variation. Kind of ironic. (Contrasted to how differing biographies assign varying birthdates to Charles Fort.)



(I was flipping through the channels on cable this weekend and found it amusing that some card at TNT programming had scheduled 2010 right when the woo-woos were gettting revved up about this.)
 
From the Space.com story
It is not known if the spot is purely an atmospheric phenomenon or if it might have been generated by some foreign object, though the latter possibility is doubted.
Click to expand...

The reason it is "doubted" is that they didn't spot anything in the vacinity before the phenomemon was observed. The next question to ask any scientist when this argument is put forward is "Were you looking?", I'll bet they weren't.

Interesting stuff though. Through my telescope Jupiter is a white disk with moons. I really must win the lottery and buy a 1m telecope on Gran Canaria. :)
 
NASA's bomb

--
Philo T
Quote
I have it from good sources that it's forest fires started by GALILEO crashing into Jupiter. The evil reptilian NWO dropped nukes on Jupiter to trigger nuclear fusion and create a new star, Lucifer. or somesuch

--
The reptilians have infiltrated NASA !!

The Galileo craft had 49 pounds of plutonium 238 on board. After impact the plutonium could have decended down into the atmosphere to the higher-pressure layers. At a certain depth the pressure would act to crush the plutonium pellets down to critical mass and bang a nuclear explosion fed by the gasses of Jupiter. This site postulates that after galileo impacted Jupiter’s outer atmosphere at over 100,000 mph the pellets (it they survived) would slowly sink down. Eventually, they calculate in about a month, the pellets would hit the right pressure level. "Coincidentally?"the black spot appeared a month after the intentional impact with Jupiter equatorial area.


http://www.enterprisemission.com/NukingJupiter.html
 
Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has this to say on that Gallileo/fission bomb theory:

"The amount of mass you need packed together to get a runaway chain reaction is called the critical mass. For plutonium 238, the kind that was on Galileo, you need about 10 or so kilograms (22 pounds) all packed tightly into a ball. Galileo had more than that amount on board, but (and this is a huge but) it was spread out in smaller pieces. The RTGs extend along a long boom, a rod that extends out from the main body of the spacecraft, and not in a way that works as a fission bomb. There are 72 separate chambers where the Pu238 was stored, and each piece had a sub-critical mass. You would have to compress those pieces together to make them critical and cause a fission reaction.

But that could not happen. Why not? Because Galileo entered Jupiter at a speed of about 100,000 miles per hour. At that speed, the pressure would tear the spacecraft apart. It slows as it passes through denser atmosphere, of course, but the pressures would be so high at those velocities that Galileo would be shredded. As the pieces fall off, they are heated due to compressing the air in front of them. This is why meteors get hot, in fact, and at these speeds the metal on Galileo would melt in short order. This would release the plutonium, dispersing it.

So instead of compressing it, as the pseudoscientists claim, the plutonium would actually get strewn through Jupiter, making it literally impossible to explode. So step one -- Galileo becoming a fission bomb -- cannot happen. "

More on the page:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/jupiter_galileo.html
 
Well I'm out on a limb so why not reach for a dead branch while I’m here

What if the "currents and winds" of Jupiter settled the remaining material together. We might (if we are daft:)) use our oceans as an example. If you go off shore to several places and drop various material there is a chance (if you ask a local fisherman) the material will all be pushed to the same basic location by the eddies and flows of the currents. They all might end up washed up on the same beach or out to sea stuck at a convergence of currents. Jupiter has a defined flow pattern that has "collected" different material in layers and bands that seems to perpetuate.

It’s a big IF. But if the remnants of the ship ended up settled together and then began their decent to the higher-pressure layers they might find themselves in the right place; maybe passing through a magnetic layer would magnetize them creating a further pull together.

This whole thing might seem nutty but hey if delicate worms survived the slower Columbia decent then why wouldn't rounded ceramic/metalic pellets survive a faster one
 
Well on the upside, you do have just over 2 critical masses of Plutonium in the probe, so you only need just under half of that to recombine to make on bomb.

On the downside, you do need to have all of it compressed into a solid lump to go critical, but assuming that enough Plutonium did come together, and the pressure deep within the planet compressed it into a solid mass, and it was pure rather than being mixed with metal from the probe or components of Jupiter's atmosphere, then I imagine it could detonate.

Giving you an explosion maybe a few kilometers across, inside a planet that is 143,000km in diameter with weather conditions that can generate hurricanes larger than the earth.

I'm not sure we'd even notice.

By contrast, the comet Shoemaker-Levy did blast some nice pock marks in the atmosphere, but it did impact with considerably more power than all of the nuclear warheads on earth combined.

http://www.lcisp.com/cloefke/html/asteroidimpact.html
 
Owing to a successful derailing of the topic in hand, a large tract of this thread has now been hacked away and glued onto the Contrails and chemtrails thread.

Now, can 'ee get this Black Spot to Galileo? (Pope Long Urban Silver VIII, c. 1616) :).
 
More a'doins transpiring

An unusual disturbance has appeared on Jupiter at the interface of the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) and the Equatorial Zone (EZ). It's visible as a very elongated bluish feature, highlighted in the center image above. The feature's bluish hue is more pronounced when it's near Jupiter's limb but is quite subtle when crossing the central meridian.
This disturbance was first detected on February 26, 2004, by European amateurs. On the 29th the new feature was some 40° long (in longitude) and was transiting Jupiter's central meridian about 2.5 hours before the Great Red Spot (GRS). Based on this estimate, you can use our GRS calculator to determine the approximate transit times of this disturbance on the next few nights. The time difference between the new feature and the GRS will increase slowly because features in Jupiter's EZ rotate slightly faster than the GRS.
Click to expand...

On February 29, 2004, Donald C. Parker of Coral Gables, Florida, acquired a series of seven CCD images showing the very large, diffuse blue feature currently visible in Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt (south is up). The feature is highlighted in the center view, acquired at 5:36 Universal Time on the 29th; the other images were taken at 5:19 (left) and 6:04 (right). Click on the photo to see the complete image set. Courtesy Don Parker.
-- picture caption
Click to expand...
 
Jupiter growing another red spot

The Great Red Spot that has dominated the planet Jupiter's cloudtops for hundreds of years now has a companion.
The gas giant is growing another red spot, which US space agency (Nasa) astronomers have nicknamed "Red Jr".

Both red spots are actually raging storms in Jupiter's cloud layer, but scientists don't yet know how they get their characteristic brick colour.

Red Jr is about half the size of the Great Red Spot and almost exactly the same colour, Science@Nasa reports.

The new storm goes by the official name of Oval BA. It was first observed in 2000, when three smaller spots collided and merged.

Changing colours

At first, Oval BA remained white - the same colour as the storms that combined to create it. But over the past few months, it has started to change in appearance.

"The oval was white in November 2005, it slowly turned brown in December 2005, and red a few weeks ago," said Christopher Go, an amateur astronomer from the Philippines who has been observing Red Jr.

Some scientists believe a similar merger to the one that created Red Jr may have created the Great Red Spot, which is twice as wide as our planet and at least 300 years old.

Dr Glenn Orton, an astronomer at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies storms on Jupiter and other giant planets, said: "This is convincing. We've been monitoring Jupiter for years to see if Oval BA would turn red - and it finally seems to be happening."

No one is quite sure why the Great Red Spot is red.

One theory is that the storm dredges material from deep beneath Jupiter's cloudtops and lifts it to high altitudes. Here, ultraviolet rays from the Sun turn colour-changing compounds (or chromophores) red.

Oval BA may have strengthened enough to do the same, scientists say.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4781730.stm
Click to expand...
 
Hold your horses this just in.... :D

Close encounter for Jupiter spots

Jupiter's two giant red spots have brushed past each other, after approaching on a "collision course".
The Great Red Spot has been known for at least 130 years. The newer spot, nicknamed "Red Jr", formed from three smaller features between 1998 and 2000.

The two spots are actually massive storm systems in Jupiter's atmosphere.

A head-on collision was never on the cards; the spots which merged to form Red Jr have passed by the Great Red Spot many times, without incident.

The atmospheric current in which they were embedded moves at a different speed from the one at the latitude of the Great Red Spot.

Over time, the two spots change relative positions causing periodic close passages like this one. But this is the first such passage since the new, smaller red spot intensified and turned red.

A picture of the event has been captured by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii by astronomers Travis Rector and Chad Trujillo.

No one is quite sure why the spots are red.

One theory is that the storm dredges material from deep beneath Jupiter's cloudtops and lifts it to high altitudes. Here, ultraviolet rays from the Sun might turn colour-changing compounds (or chromophores) red.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5214664.stm
Click to expand...
 
Amateur first to spot big bang on Jupiter
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Wednesday, 22 July 2009

Anthony Wesley was engaged in his favourite backyard pastime of watching Jupiter through his 14.5-inch-wide Newtonian telescope when the amateur Australian astronomer made the discovery of a lifetime – a find that has astonished and enthralled professional planet watchers around the world.

It was just after midnight on Sunday and Mr Wesley, a 44-year-old IT consultant living in the rural town of Murrumbateman near Canberra, was about to call it a night after the clear skies he had enjoyed that evening began to deteriorate and visibility fell.

But having gone inside and got caught up watching golfer Tom Watson almost make history in the Open on television, something made Mr Wesley return to the computer screen of his home-made telescope once more. It was then he saw the dark disfiguration of a region near to Jupiter's south pole, a part of the planet that he knew well from his many hours of painstaking observations.

"When I came back to my 'scope at about 12.40am, I noticed a dark spot rotating into view in Jupiter's south polar region [and] started to get curious. When first seen... it was only a vaguely dark spot, I thought likely to be just a normal dark polar storm," Mr Wesley recorded in his observation report.

"However, as it rotated further into view, and the conditions improved, I suddenly realised that it wasn't just dark, it was black in all channels, meaning it was truly a black spot," he said.

His first thought was that it was one of Jupiter's darker moons, such as Callisto, or at least the shadow from such a moon. "But it was in the wrong place and the wrong size. Also, I had noticed it was moving too slow to be a moon or shadow," he said. "As far as I could see it was rotating in sync with a nearby white oval storm that I was very familiar with – this could only mean that the black feature was at the cloud level and not a projected shadow from a moon. I started to get excited."

For the next 15 minutes Mr Wesley furiously checked his photographs of the same region taken just two days before. There was no sign of the black spot. It was then he realised the full magnitude of his discovery – he had witnessed the immediate aftermath of a cosmic collision between Jupiter and some as-yet-unidentified object. 8)

Mr Wesley remembered one of the most famous cosmic impacts in recent times, when the comet Shoemaker-Levy pounded Jupiter exactly 15 years ago with the explosive power of thousands of nuclear bombs. "I remember watching Jupiter back then, so I grew up with those images," he said.

"Could it really be an impact mark on Jupiter? I had no real idea, and the odds on that happening were so small as to be laughable, but I was really struggling to see any other possibility given the location of the mark. If it really was an impact mark then I had to start telling people, and quickly," he said.

The "surreal" experience of seeing the same sort of image again spurred him into action. He quickly fired off emails to the international astronomical community and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).

Glenn Orton of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used a high-powered infrared telescope on a mountaintop in Hawaii to confirm the sighting. The dark spot was accompanied by bright "upwelling particles" in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, with the possible emission of ammonia gas, – the tell-tale signs of a massive impact.

It was clear that Jupiter had been hit, although Dr Orton and his Nasa colleagues were not sure whether it was by a comet or some other celestial object. "It could be the impact of a comet, but we don't know for sure yet," Dr Orton said.

"We were extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event," he said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 55868.html
 
Hubble pictures Jupiter's 'scar'

Hubble has trained its new camera on the atmospheric disturbance on Jupiter believed to have been caused by a comet or asteroid impact.

The telescope used the Wide Field Camera 3 fitted on the recent shuttle servicing mission to capture ultra-sharp visible-light images of the scar.

The dark spot near the gas giant's southern pole was noticed first by an amateur Australian astronomer.

Some of the world's biggest telescopes have since taken detailed pictures.

Engineers at the US space agency, Nasa, interrupted the post-servicing commissioning of the refurbished Hubble to use the WFC-3.

"Because we believe this magnitude of impact is rare, we are very fortunate to see it with Hubble," said Amy Simon-Miller of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"Details seen in the Hubble view show a lumpiness to the debris plume caused by turbulence in Jupiter's atmosphere."

The pictures augur well for Hubble. Its servicing should give it several more years of life.

The WFC-3 will be used to take the deepest images of the cosmos yet.

Astronomers cannot be absolutely sure Jupiter was struck by a space object, but the evidence seems compelling. One estimate of the diameter of the impacting body suggests it may have been hundreds of metres wide.

"This is just one example of what Hubble's new, state-of-the-art camera can do, thanks to the [shuttle] astronauts and the entire Hubble team," said Ed Weiler, Nasa's chief scientist. "However, the best is yet to come."

It is 15 years since Jupiter was famously hit by Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. It broke up into several pieces as it plunged on to the gas giant. There was prior warning of that event and Hubble took some typically remarkable pictures on that occasion, too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8168403.stm
 
Jupiter loses one of its stripes and scientists are stumped as to why
By Claire Bates
Last updated at 11:40 PM on 12th May 2010

The largest planet in our solar system is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere, with one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.
However, the most recent images taken by amateur astronomers have revealed the lower stripe known as the Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared leaving the southern half of the planet looking unusually bare.
The band was present at the end of last year before Jupiter ducked behind the Sun on its orbit. However, when it emerged three months later the belt had disappeared.

Journalist and amateur astronomer Bob King, also known as Astro_Bob, was one of the first to note the strange phenomenon.
He said: 'Jupiter with only one belt is almost like seeing Saturn when its rings are edge-on and invisible for a time - it just doesn't look right.'
It is not the first time this unusual phenomenon has been noticed. Jupiter loses or regains one of its belts every ten of 15 years, although exactly why this happens is a mystery.

The planet is a giant ball of gas and liquid around 500million miles from the Sun. It's surface is composed of dense red, brown, yellow, and white clouds arranged in light-coloured areas called zones and darker regions called belts.

These clouds are created by chemicals that have formed at different heights. The highest white clouds in the zones are made of crystals of frozen ammonia. Darker, lower clouds are created from chemicals including sulphur and phosphorus. The clouds are blown into bands by 350mph winds caused by Jupiter's rapid rotation.

Noted Jupiter watcher Anthony Wesley, who spotted an impact spot on its surface last year, has tracked the disappearing belt from his back garden in Australia.
'It was obvious last year that it was fading. It was closely observed by anyone watching Jupiter,' he told The Planetary Society.
'There was a big rush on to find out what had changed once it came back into view.'

Mr Wesley said while it was a mystery as to what had caused the belt to fade, the most likely explanation was that it was linked to storm activity that preceded the change.
'The question now is when will the South Equatorial belt erupt back into activity and reappear?' Mr Wesley said.
The pattern for this happening is when a brilliant white spot forms in the southern zone. Gradually it will start to spout dark blobs of material which will be stretched by Jupiter's fierce winds into a new belt, and the planet will return to its familiar 'tyre track' appearance.

Jupiter will be closest to Earth on September 24, offering stargazers their best chance of seeing it without its stripe.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z0nnXuRLro
 
One way that the Southern Equatorial Belt might have disappeared is below a thin haze of white ammonia clouds, something like cirrostratus. The thing to remember about Jupiter's belts and zones is that they are not permanent feature - they are weather.
 
Jupiter collision 'was asteroid'
Page last updated at 16:54 GMT, Friday, 4 June 2010 17:54 UK
By Katia Moskvitch
Science reporter, BBC News

An object that hit Jupiter last year with a force equivalent to a few thousand nuclear bombs, which left it with a scar the size of Pacific Ocean was probably an asteroid, say astronomers.
Images of the "bruise" captured by the Hubble telescope show the aftermath of an asteroid striking a planet.
It could provide clues about what might happen if a similar object hit Earth.
The spot was first seen in 2009 by an Australian amateur astronomer.
The astronomer in question, Anthony Wesley, has recently taken another striking image of an bright fireball hitting the gas giant. Scientists believe it to be a meteoroid - a small particle of space debris.

A team of scientists described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters how they compared the 2009 Hubble images with those of scars left on Jupiter by a comet in 1994.
Jupiter impacts were thought to be quite rare. After the latest collision with a comet called P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, or SL9, astronomers didn't expect any other strikes for at least several hundred years.
That is why some 500m-wide space rock plunging into the gas giant's atmosphere was rather unexpected, said astronomer Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who led the study.
"This solitary event caught us by surprise," she said.

"We can only see the aftermath of the impact, but fortunately we do have the 1994 Hubble observations that captured the full range of impact phenomena, including the nature of the objects from pre-impact observations."

Dr Hammel's team used the Hubble telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 to zoom in on the blemish near the Jupiter's southern pole and captured several sharp ultraviolet images.
The scientists compared the pictures with those of the scars left by SL9 15 years earlier and saw important differences between the two impacts.
Most importantly, they found no "halo" around the latest collision site. A comet would have generated a halo of fine dust as it impacted the surface.
The clues helped them to conclude that the mystery object was probably not a dusty comet but a solid space rock that perhaps came from a nearby asteroid belt.

Agustin Sanchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain called Jupiter a "natural laboratory" to see what might happen to our planet in the event of a similar collision.
"It would be a catastrophe," he said.
"The Jupiter impact produced a pattern of debris some 5,000km long and 2,800 km wide - half the size of the Earth. And even if the response of the Earth atmosphere is different from that of Jupiter, entire continents could be destroyed."

The scientist also commented on the latest flash spotted on Jupiter by Anthony Wesley and another amateur, Christopher Go from the Philippines.
It is believed to be the very first image of a meteoroid hitting a planet.

This also shows that amateur astronomers now have the necessary high quality technology to capture such events that only last a few seconds.
"We cannot devote the Hubble space telescope or other telescopes to observe Jupiter regularly, it is impossible," he said.
"And the amateurs make a very good survey of what is happening there, contributing to our database."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_ ... 238332.stm
 
Jupiter attacked for third time in 13 months
00:13 24 August 2010 by David Shiga

For the third time in just over a year, amateur astronomers have detected a comet or asteroid strike on Jupiter. The observations, made possible by the widespread use of astronomical video recordings, show that impacts on the giant planet occur more frequently than previously thought.

On Friday, a small comet or asteroid slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere, producing a brief fireball that was independently recorded by two Japanese amateur astronomers taking video through their telescopes (see the images and videos).

The observation comes hot on the heels of two similar observations by amateur astronomers in the last 13 months – one in June 2010 and the other in July 2009, though in the latter case only a dark bruise left by the impact was observed.

Prior to the three recent observations, only one definite case of a comet or asteroid hitting Jupiter was known – the collision of fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994, an event that was predicted in advance and widely observed with professional telescopes. In 1690, however, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who discovered four of Saturn's moons, made drawings of an event that looked suspiciously like an impact.

At the time of the 1994 comet strike, astronomers thought that impacts on Jupiter might occur only once in several centuries. But the recent amateur observations suggest that estimate is wrong.

The sudden abundance of such observations is probably thanks to a technique for making very sharp still images by combining the clearest frames from a video recording, says Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Since distortion from the atmosphere changes the quality of astronomical observing, called "seeing", on short timescales, this process allows observers to pull out the best snapshots and ignore blurry frames.

Orton and a group of astronomers led by Australian amateur Anthony Wesley have suggested setting up a worldwide network of small automated telescopes to continuously monitor Jupiter for impacts.

They submitted a proposal on the idea to a committee of the US National Research Council that will set priorities for planetary science for the coming decade in a report to be released in 2011.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... onths.html
 
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