Hm hm hm…..*poof*…………..is that all you got? 🙂 Here’s a video of yesterday’s impact on Jupiter by whatever object was unfortunate enough to have a run-in with the gigantic planet. This was made by Anthony Wesley, the Australian astronomer who spotted the event as it happened through his custom telescope setup. Keep in mind that…
Category: Jupiter
Jupiter Takes a Hit…Again!
Even as the Hubble team released the image above detailing the scars from the July 2009 asteroid impact on Jupiter, another object was on a collision course with our solar system’s giant planet…and Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was at his station (yet again!) and captured an image of the impact! Read all about it…
Inside the Hurricane
The largest storm in the solar system, Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, is a monstrous 15,000-mile-wide hurricane that’s been swirling in the giant planet’s mid-lower latitudes for at least 300 years. It’s believed that the storm’s colors are caused by the different elements within Jupiter’s upper atmosphere… ammonia, methane, water, hydrocarbons and other chemicals that create a…
Portrait of Io
Here’s a beautiful high-resolution portrait of Io by Jason Perry, assembled from Galileo images taken in 1999 and posted to The Gish Bar Times, his website dedicated to Jupiter’s volcanic moon. Check out the link for a labeled version of the image as well as details on how it was created. Slightly larger than our…
Next Stop: Jupiter
NASA’s “What’s Up” video series highlights Jupiter this month, and explains the upcoming Juno mission set to launch in August 2011.
A Giant Among Moons
The largest of Jupiter’s 63 known moons and the largest moon in our solar system, Ganymede has twice the mass of our own moon and is even larger than the planet Mercury. Its surface is marked by dark regions which are full of craters and lighter areas lined with ridges. This image was taken by…
Blast Zone
The Hubble Space Telescope trained its newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Jupiter, capturing a photo of the recent impact scar made on July 19. This image is the first taken by the new camera installed in May, and while it’s still uncalibrated, details can be seen of the dark debris plume that has spread…
Taking a Hit
Between the hours of 6am and noon EDT on Monday, July 20, something smashed into Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. And here’s the scar to prove it. First noticed as a dark blotch by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, monitoring the giant planet via telescope from Australia, the impact was soon confirmed via…
As The World Turns
A very cool animation sequence by Gordan U., showing 21 sequences of the Jupiter system. Big Daddy Jove, clouds a-churnin’, all the kids running around. Nice work Gordan! Animation: Gordan Ugarkovic. Used with permission.
Will Worlds Collide?
According to a June 10 article in New Scientist, studies on the variable nature of planetary orbits have shown some valid possibilities of collisions in the future. (The very distant future, luckily for us.) Due to the nature of Jupiter’s massive gravitational pull on the inner planets, especially Mercury, their orbits are susceptible to incredible…
King of the Gods
This image, taken over 9 years ago by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft on its way to Saturn, is still hailed as one of the best photos ever taken of Jupiter. Actually a carefully crafted composite of 27 images, this image took more than an hour to capture. It later had to be painstakingly adjusted to account…
Eye of the Storm
The swirling storms of Jupiter writhe and churn while little Europa sails by in this dramatic photo from Cassini, taken on January 2, 2001 and retouched and edited to show natural colors by the talented Gordan Ugarkovic. Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is featured prominently here. It is an enormous hurricane that has been…
Lights in the Dark 