Jupiter Impact Animation Project
Animation of Jupiter just after the impact discovery. Source photos courtesy Anthony Wesley.
An extremly rare event occurred between 17-th and 19-th of July - a comet or an asteroid impacted Jupiter. The impact event resulted in a new dark spot in the planet's atmosphere. This spot was discovered by an Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley on 19 July 2009.
The Cosmos Motion project invites amateur astronomers to participate in creation of an animation of the mysterious dark spot evolution. The goal of the animation is to capture changes in a trace of the impact. To contribute to the animation please e-mail your photos of Jupiter at motioncosmos@gmail.com
The Hubble Space Telescope image of the dark spot taken on July 23. Photo credit: NASA, ESA, H. Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.), and the Jupiter Impact Team.
Animation presented on this page shows Jupiter just after the impact discovery. Source photos courtesy Anthony Wesley.
You can also download high quality animation:
Even though the world largest observatories (including the Hubble Space Telescope) observe the impact it is obvious that observations of amateur astronomers are extremely valuable. Thanks to progress of an astronomical equipment many astronomers over the world could make very important observations nowadays. Many exciting discoveries (including the Jupiter impact event) were made by amateur astronomers in recent time.
On the other hand, neither amateur observer nor large observatory could make continuos observations. Finally they will be interrupted by a set of an interested object or a bad weather conditions. On the contrary, a worldwide net of observers could make continuos observations and their images could give a full picture of an event.
Primary aims of the Cosmos Motion project are to find, collect and process images for creation of animations of interesting astronomical events. In fact every animation is just an organised collection of the state of art images made by amateur astronomers all over the world.
The Cosmos Motion project thanks very much all participated astronomers - the real authors of the animations. You can find all participants in a members list.
Photos required for the animation:
- High resolution images of Jupiter made after 1 July 2009
- Wide field images of the sky showing Jupiter's location among the stars made after 1 July 2009
- Date and time the photo was captured
- Focal length of a telescope or camera lenses
- Camera type
- Type of the colour filters (if used)