Dark impact mark in Jupiters south polar region

That's an excellent question Dave.
It would be worth investigating that,
maybe asking on the other astro websites?

Dave_Lillis wrote:

Dont suppose anyone took any deepsky images around jupiter in recent weeks before the impact?

I had some correspondence with some of the people investigating this. From that the general feeling is that if there were further fragments they would have impacted by now so the fact that we are not seeing any major secondary sites suggest that the impactor did not break up. I don't know if you guys noticed this but there is some very real suggestion of much smaller secondary impact marks in some of Anthony's images (at about 4o'clock and immediateoly next to the main impact mark). This suggests that the object did break up only very shortly before impact.
Again the strong likelyhood is that the likely impactor was a small comet < 1km in diameter also very likely coming from behind Jupiter. I can tell you that a comet of that size approaching Jupiter from behind would be fainter that mag.+20. Likely around mag 21-23. This would be much fainter than even the most deep images would go unless you managed to have a 1m+ scope. Even a scope this size would not be able to get this faint within a few degrees of jupiter. Glenn Orton (JPL) mentioned to me in an email that the 'holy grail' would be an image of Jupiter with a bright flash on the limb. Sadly 'the holy grail' doesn't look like making an appearance:(

A superb animation has popped up on spaceweather showing the evolution of the impact.
http://spaceweather.com/swpod2009/09aug09/polar_334.gif?PHPSESSID=n65brojt3g4jia9ov1mt6inc75
spaceweather.com/swpod2009/09aug09/polar...jt3g4jia9ov1mt6inc75
German astronomer Hans Joerg Mettig has converted some of his best images into polar projections.
see spaceweather.com/

Amazing that it seems to break into three parts with a fourth part arcing south and then rejoining. If you zoom in with your browser the follow the flows of the different bands and zones, it's almost hypnotic,

That's a cool animation. How on earth does one do a "polar" projection?

That's superb.
I can't imagine how much effort went into that.

Dave_Lillis wrote:

Amazing that it seems to break into three parts with a fourth part arcing south and then rejoining.

A cool artefact, and clear proof, about the different convection zones, even on such a short area of latitude methinks. That's a superb animation.

Seanie.