Amateur Astronomers Spot Jovian Blast 86
RocketAcademy writes "Spaceweather.com reports an explosion on Jupiter, which was detected by two amateur astronomers. According to Spaceweather.com, the event occurred at 11:35 Universal Time on September 10. Dan Peterson of Racine, Wisconsin, observing through a 12-inch Meade telescope, observed a white flash lasting for 1.5-2 seconds. George Hall of Dallas, Texas was capturing a video of Jupiter at the time, which also captured the event. It's believed that the explosion was due to a comet or small asteroid collision. Similar events were observed in the past, in June and August 2010."
Actual video please? (Score:4, Informative)
The linked video is to a very cheesy still image montage about comet/asteroid impacts, and only shows this recent Jupiter impact as a still screenshot of the video playing on someone's computer.
Anybody have a better link? At least to a real still of the event?
Thank you Jupiter! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Actual video please? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:random thoughts... (Score:4, Informative)
It's been going 38,000 mph for 35 years. And it's just now leaving our local solar system.
Another stat I love: How many man-hours of effort have been put into determining safe courses for our probes to pass through the main asteroid belt, in total over all outer-solar-system probes?
Zero.
Re:Going to try to spot the scars (Score:4, Informative)
A couple of things to know:
* Aperture (thus ability to gather light) is more important than magnification.
* There are essentially 3 kinds of scopes:
1) Refractor (classic design)
2) Newtonian reflector (more affordable). Newtonians are generally less money and give you more bang for the buck, and Dobsonian Newtonians are even better bargains, though a dob can't track objects as they can't use an equatorial mount. I have an 8" dob, and a small 80mm refractor, but what I'd really like is a
3) Cassegrain: , which is like an optically "folded" newtonian - they're small, light, and powerful, but not as cheap as newtonians.
You can look here for starters: http://www.telescope.com/ [telescope.com] (Orion)