Bird's discovery made CNN yesterday - including a short telephone interview!

Phil.

....and now the BBC have picked up on the story (about time the media took notice!)

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8161723.stm

Excellent!
Also sky news with a bit of an interview .

news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Jup...lision_Ahead_Of_Nasa

It took a while didnt it, I was surprised it wasnt on the news in recent days.
As for the credit, its only fair play, who could have honestly thought of it was a "tip off"?
How can someone get a tip off about an impact on Jupiter, did they overhear it been mentioned in a bar or something?, morons!

Well done Anthony! Amazing storyI I hope you all had good weather to see Jupiter.
Michael

Unfortunately weather has been terrible here in the last few days!

This is a great read! Well done Anthony, you sure are going to leave your 'mark' in Astronomy now!

"I remember the day when this Aussie guy called Anthony, who is NOT Greek, on an Astronomy forum..."


Seanie.

Thanks to everyone for the great comments, sorry I haven't been back in the last few days, it's gone a bit loopy over here with the media attention and all...

I posted here (as well as on CN and IIS) because I was concerned to get everyones attention and make sure the site was imaged again on the next rotation which was only about 8 hours away at the time... I've had an account on this forum for a couple of years and it's nice to see what's happening in other parts of the world.

I'm often lurking on this forum and reading posts, but don't submit very much.

At 2am Monday morning (my time) all I could think was to get the alert out to everywhere that I could, by email and by forum, and hope that it was picked up.

cheers, it's been a fun week.

Bird

Let me add my congratulations to the many that Bird has already received from around the world. He now knows he has the full credit when the Hubble is pointed at Jupiter and the press release from NASA states "Discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley"
see here for the press release
hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/23/text/

and here for the photos
hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/23/image/

You know Anthony, you actally took my mind off some disappointing news about the solar eclipse in China. When my group rang me to say they had been clouded out I answered with "Never mind that, something big just hit Jupiter"
Brian

The hubble images almost make it look like someone made a gash in the side of Jupiter.
We had some good skies tonight, the seeing was pretty good aswell, I was surprised to see how obvious this thing is, at times it resembles a moon shadow.
I put the toucam on the 12" and got this image, I processed it on a laptop screen so I hope it looks ok.

farm4.static.flickr.com/3455/3754059174_fe6b06e87a_o.jpg

I expect the skynyx/DMK guys to get some super images from tonight. Funny thing is that I could see more then the camera could capture, my kingdom for a proper planetary camera.
What are the odds of this happening 15 years to they day of SL9 ?!?

Hi all, Dave, your shot from last night is what I observed through my 8" SCT ay x160 andx200. It looked like a moon shadow and was plainly visible when the seeing was very good.

Keith..

Wow! How many of us have imaged something that made the HST want to take a peek! WOW!

Michael.

I went back and had a second go at reprocessing it

I think I prefer this colour hue. it pretty much represents how it was in the eyepiece.
Looking forward ot the next clear night to see how much it has changed.

Did anyone see anything on RTE about this event??

Second image is a lot better.
Was there something on RTE about it?
I saw a lot about it on the American news channells alright.

yea, some channels carried it, I dont think RTE did, anyone see it on their news programs or on the radio? I wouldnt be too surprised if they decided to pass it by.

I was thinking about this impact, comparing it to SL9, is it possible that this thing is part of a longer string of objects? it might be worth monitoring jupiter for more impacts over the coming week, pure speculation of course, it worth monitoring anyway just to see how the impact site evolves.

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

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.