Jupiter just got smacked by a space rock and an amateur astronomer caught it on camera

[Admin]

Brazilian observer José Luis Pereira captured a bright flash on the solar system's largest planet Monday night (Sept. 13), memorializing the fiery death of a space rock high in the Jovian atmosphere.

Jupiter just got smacked by a space rock and an amateur astronomer caught it on camera : Read more

 

[Pogo]

We get quite a few meteors everyday, likely Jupiter gets hundreds of times more, we just don’t notice it, and only a few of the really big ones.

 

[sam85geo]

Jupiter does a good job running interference for Earth; some noteworthy prehistoric exceptions notwithstanding.

 

[Pogo]

Jupiter does a good job running interference for Earth; some noteworthy prehistoric exceptions notwithstanding.

Nobody's perfect. :

 

[rod]

The article stated, "Because it orbits close to the main asteroid belt and features a powerful gravitational pull, Jupiter gets pummeled fairly often. In July 1994, for example, fragments of the broken-apart Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 famously slammed into Jupiter, creating big bruises in the planet's thick atmosphere that lasted for months."

In 1994, I observed some of those impacts in the form of large black eye area using my telescope (90-mm refractor). From my log. [The impacts took place on Jupiter 16-22 of July 1994. I used the TeleVue 9-mm Nagler and the TeleVue 1.8x barlow lens for viewing Jupiter (200x). G fragment made a large black eye to see on Jupiter that week. The G fragment created a large impact area on Jupiter and rotated into view. I could see the area clearly with my telescope because the diameter was larger than Earth and it looked like a large, black eye area .]

That was quite a wallop on Jupiter I could easily see

 

[Pogo]

And that’s just the ones we can see from here . . .