Something May Have Just Hit Jupiter

The blog of Anthony Wesley, an Australian amateur astronomer, has what may be the first photos of a recent comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter, near the south pole. These photos are 11 hours old. The ones at the bottom of the page show three small dark spots in addition to the main dark mark. The Bad Astronomy blog picked up the story a few hours later — but cautions that what we're seeing may not be an impact event. This is all reminiscent of the closely watched impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter in 1994.

Comments

Alternate site for slashdotted article

[Romancer]

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/19/possible-new-impact-on-jupiter/

Re:Yep, that's why God put em there

[spankyofoz]

Sorry, I could have worded it better. I'm not claiming intelligent design put Jupiter there, merely that Jupiter is doing what Jupiter does, and that this event is nothing out of the ordinary.

Very cool that it was captured (by an Aussie)

Re:Or may not have

[Aussie]

>An amateur astronomer puts up pictures on his blog and we're comparing it to Shoemaker-Levy?

Levy is an amateur, his degree is in english lit. He won an amateur astronomers award.

(what I tried to post last time, bloody web2 crap)

new site jupiter.samba.org

[tridge]

Anthony's webserver has been slashdotted, but
he has copied the files to:

    http://jupiter.samba.org/

He is now trying to login to his server so he
can redirect the pages to the above site.

As well as being an amateur astronomer, Anthony
is a keen Linux enthusiast. His home built
telescope is controlled by his Linux box.

Cheers, Tridge

Re:Hubble!

[rcw-home]

Isn't Jupiter too close for the Hubble? It's a deep space telescope and Jupiter hardly counts.

Just like my point-and-shoot camera doesn't care whether something is 100 feet away or several miles away when I manually set it to infinite focus, the Hubble Space Telescope doesn't care whether something is a light second or several billion light years away. It has imaged every planet in the solar system except Mercury (including Earth), has imaged the moon, and once indirectly imaged the sun.

please use new URL

[Anonymous Coward]

Can the slashdot admins please move the link in the story to the new site? I can't even log into my box to put the redirect in place...

http://jupiter.samba.org/

Thanks again Tridge, you're a lifesaver

Anthony

Re:Or may not have

[dido]

It's the amateurs that tend to be the first to discover unknown stuff like comets and stuff. The professionals are in general engaged in directed research and do not have the time to be poking around random areas of the sky to see if anything interesting is going on there. As someone mentioned, David Levy is himself an amateur.