New black spot on Jupiter -- from comet, asteroid?

By at 8:49 am Monday, Jul 20

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An amateur astronomer in Australia was the first person to report the appearance of this black spot on Jupiter on July 19. Anthony Wesley from Canberra wrote on his online journal:

It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I'd imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place - I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this new event. In the end I imaged for another 30 minutes only because the conditions were slowly improving and each capture was giving a slightly better image than the last.

Eventually I stopped imaging and went up to the house to start emailing people, with this image above processed as quick and dirty as possible just to have something to show.

Impact mark on Jupiter, 19th July 2009

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Mark Frauenfelder

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