Captured on camera by astrophotographer Rafael Defavari from his location in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil, this video shows the Moon passing in front of Jupiter during an occultation event on December 25, 2012. Nice work!
The video plays at 5x actual speed.
Although Jupiter appeared to be “right next to” the Moon on Christmas night from our viewpoint here on Earth, in reality the two worlds were 388 million miles (625 million km) apart. The Moon blocked the view of the giant planet for a full hour and ten minutes.
‘Tis the season for lunar occultations, too… the last one occurred on November 28, and the next will be on January 22, 2013.
See more photos of the Dec. 25 event from viewers in Brazil here.
The full Moon rising with Jupiter and Aldebaran on November 28, 2012 in North Carolina, USA. Credit: Tavi Greiner.
The full Moon is a-rising tonight, and it is not alone. There are lots of other bright and beautiful stars and planets out there — some snuggling right up together — and already we’ve got astrophotographers out there capturing the views. Above, Tavi Greiner had a gorgeous view of the Moon, along with bright Jupiter and Aldebaran. November’s full Moon is known as the “Beaver Moon,” or “Frosty Moon,” and this year it is the smallest full Moon of 2012, since the Moon is at apogee, the farthest distance in its orbit around the Earth. There was also a penumbral lunar eclipse earlier today, depending on where you are…
See more below:
The Moon, along with Jupiter and its moons. Credit: Kevin Gassen
“This is a composite of two images of the Moon and Jupiter, taken in Central Texas, November 28th, with my Canon T2i,” writes Kevin Gassen. “The images were taken less than a minute apart, one each with the proper settings to capture the moon and Jupiter as seen. The images were combined in Photoshop Elements 6 with only minor contrast adjustments to the moon. Relative sizes were unchanged.”
Moon – Jupiter Conjunction, November 28, 2012. Credit: Gustavo Sanchez
Speaking of bright Jupiter, here’s a great view of the giant planet in all its glory near the Moon.
Corona around the Full Moon November 27, 2012. (The Pleiades are in amongst the clouds, too). Credit: Sculptor Lil
Visibility of penumbral lunar eclipse of November 28, 2012. Image Credit: Fred Espenak
The penumbral eclipse of the Moon occurred during the early dawn on Wednesday morning for western North America, and during the middle of the night for the longitudes of Australia and Japan, in late evening of the 28th local date for China and Southeast Asia, and early that evening for India. Eastern Canada and the USA couldn’t see it at all as it occurred after Moonset.
Saturn, Venus, & Mercury Conjunction on 11-28-2012. Credit: John Chumack
And early this morning John Chumack was out to capture a plethora of planets together. Saturn, Venus, and Mercury Conjunction – Planetary Alignment on 11-28-2012 06:39am E.S.T. Venus is the brightest between the house and tree , Saturn right above Venus, and Mercury is below in between the power lines.
We’ll add more images as they come in!
And if you want to know when the next full Moon is coming up, check out our Phases of the Moon app on either Google Play or the iTunes Store, and help support Universe Today.
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Here’s a recent view of Jupiter, with its moon Europa just coming into view from behind the planet, as seen by Efrain Morales of the Jaicoa Observatory in Puerto Rico. Why two images? This is a different way to see it in 3-D — just focus on the center between the 2 images and kind of cross your eyes. Not everyone can see the effect, but its pretty cool when it works. Click the image for a larger version.
Efrain took the image on November 4th, at 07:20 UTC. Also visible are the Great Red Spot and Oval Ba transiting across the Jovian disk.
Equipment: LX200ACF 12 in. OTA, CGE mount, Flea3 Ccd, TeleVue 3x barlows, Astronomik RGB filter set.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
The original observations (top) and interpretations (bottom) of the first ever amateur albedo map of Ganymede. Credit: Manos Kardasis.
As our frequent “Astrophoto” posts from amateur astronomers and photographers attest – as well as the rise of citizen science — , the latest technology allows amatuers to make significant contributions to the field of astronomy. Case in point: Emmanuel I. Kardasis of the Hellenic Amateur Astronomy Association has produced the first amateur albedo map of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. He used an off-the-shelf telescope, camera and computer equipment, but put his experienced observing skills to the test.
“Ganymede has a tiny disk as seen from Earth so was a good test for my techniques,” said Kardasis. “If the same methods were applied to other worlds, perhaps the volcanic moon Io, we could capture surface fluctuations. Professional observatories may create better images but they cannot monitor our rapidly and ever-changing Universe.”
Albedo maps of Ganymede (left) and how they relate to known surface features (right). Credit: Manos Kardasis.
Like many amateurs, Kardasis attached a camera to his telescope and recorded a video of Ganymede. Selecting only the sharpest frames of the video allowed him to obtain a series of images when the atmospheric conditions – known as ‘seeing’ – were most favorable. These best images were then stacked and aligned, before being enhanced through photo-editing software.
An albedo map details higher areas of reflectivity on an object’s surface recording where material is brighter or darker. Kardasis’ albedo map closely aligns with professional images of Ganymede’s surface, indicating features such as Phrygia Sulcus (furrows and ridges 3,700 km across) and the Nicholson region (a low-lying darker area).
Amateur photographs of Jupiter and Ganymede, accompanied with a professionally-obtained labeled map (bottom right). Credit: Manos Kardasis.
“Creating useful images of planets requires a telescope with a diameter of at least eight inches, said Kardasis. “For tiny discs, such as the moons of Jupiter, bigger is definitely better. My Ganymede images were made using an 11-inch telescope. You also need a good motor drive on your tripod, a sensitive camera, some freely-available software, and lots of patience!”
Kardasis presented his images at the European Planetary Science Congress this week in Madrid, Spain. He suggests that future amateur programs could monitor both surface and atmospheric changes on worlds as varied as Uranus, Neptune and Titan, complementing more detailed but far less regular observations made by professionals. Kardasis says, “I hope my work will inspire anyone interested in astronomy to use whatever equipment they have to make useful observations.”
An impact on Jupiter captured about 6:35 am on Sept. 10, 2012 from Dallas, Texas USA. Credit: George Hall.
A bright flash was spotted on Jupiter early on the morning of September 10, 2012, and astronomers were hoping to later see an impact “scar” which would provide more information about the object that slammed into the giant gas planet. Was it a comet, asteroid or a smaller meteor? But alas, no impact scar or debris field showed up on Jupiter’s face and the nature of this explosion may remain a mystery.
“By performing spectroscopic measurement of the debris field we hope to be capable of determining the nature of the impactor,” SETI astronomer Franck Marchis told Universe Today via email. “Without debris field it is virtually impossible since the bolide burned in the upper atmosphere. One day we may be capable of recorded a spectrum of the meteor itself (during the impact) but right now we don’t have such capabilities.”
The flash was first spotted by Dan Peterson, an amateur astronomer from Racine, Wisconsin who saw the flash as he was looking through a telescope, but he wasn’t recording his observations. He posted about his sighting on the Association of Lunar & Planetary Observers message board (ALPO), reporting the explosion, which occurred inside the southern edge of Jupiter’s northern equatorial belt of clouds.
Astrophotographer George Hall of Dallas, Texas happened to be shooting video of Jupiter at the time – although he wasn’t actually watching Jupiter himself. When he heard about Petersen’s visual, Hall reviewed his video and saw he had captured the flash at 6:35 a.m. CDT.
Many astronomers were waiting for the next day when the impact region would be visible again to look for a debris field, as the explosion looked very similar to an impact that occurred in June 2010, which left an impact scar that was visible for several hours.
However, astronomer Mike Wong from the University of California, Berkeley had stayed up all night to estimate the amount of energy delivered by this fireball. As he posted on his blog, he predicted “that this event is too small to create a visible impact scar.”
He ended up being right.
Since there was no impact scar, the space telescopes like Hubble weren’t activated to take a look.
But some ground-based telescopes, like NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility did take a look. Astronomer Glenn Orton, a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the IRTF 3-meter telescope to look at Jupiter in the near-infrared, but came up empty in finding any debris or scar.
Observations of Jupiter taken with the IRTF telescope and the SpeX guide camera. The dark circle indicates the location of the flash observed on September 10 2012 (credit: G. Orton, Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
“Most things in that part of the solar system are called Jupiter-family comets,” Orton said. “They’re ice balls that move in and have started co-orbiting around Jupiter.”
But Marchis said that since the object appears to have not entered the inner part of the planet atmosphere, the IR observation confirms that it was most likely a meteor.
And another scientist, Dr. Tony Phillips, an astronomer and the person behind Spaceweather.com, was interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday last week and he said the explosion was probably a small asteroid hitting Jupiter, but added, “We’ll probably never know for sure,”
But whatever it was, the event demonstrates how different astronomy is now from what it was just a few years ago.
“What is remarkable today is that amateur astronomers can detect such an event, and by using modern communication tools, the world of astronomers is instantaneously aware of it,” Marchis said. “Our solar system is full of those transient events (impact, volcanoes, storms), their early detection and monitoring is a great opportunity to characterize these planets or satellites, shining light on area of these bodies that cannot be seen when they are in their calm state.”
But there were a few dissenters, too. A small number of those posting on the astronomy community message boards said that since there wasn’t any scar visible, that the event really didn’t happen, and that Hall and Petersen were just seeing things. This may have been fueled by an initial discrepancy between Hall and Petersen’s timing report, but it was solved when Petersen found out that his clock was running 26 seconds fast. Others came up with different ideas about what it might have been, which included light from one of Jupiter’s moons, Adrastea, which was entering the eastern limb of Jupiter at about the same the time, to other, more wilder notions that might have involved alien spaceships.
But most astronomers concur the event did occur.
“Two observers reported the same event at almost the same time does not look to me that we could argue about the genuineness of the event,” Marchis said, noting that previous events like this have occurred in the past, with no impact scars. “Several events were observed in 1981 and 2010 as well and there were no scar as well. We can simply assume that the impactor was too small to reach the inner part of Jupiter atmosphere. It burned before reaching the lower deck because it was relatively small.”
Phillips mentioned that years ago, astronomers were skeptical that impacts like this happened in the Solar System today, but that all changed when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter in 1994, and with hundreds of telescopes watching the event, including the Hubble Space Telescope, “we got to see what a comet impact looked like, and analyze the chemical signature,” Phillips said.
But in this case, astronomers will very likely never know what caused the flash on Jupiter on September 10, 2012. But don’t worry – this won’t be the last time something like this happens. Marchis said in a comment on his blog that based on the current observations, it’s estimated that 50 meteors like this — or ones even more energetic — could be seen on Jupiter per year. We just don’t happen to catch very many of them in the act of occurring.
And if you’re excited about seeing explosions on other worlds, Jupiter isn’t the only place this happens. All our planets and moons get smacked occasionally, as the impact craters on the rocky bodies can attest. The best place to see this happening might be our own Moon. If you have a big enough telescope, you can join a group run through the Marshall Space Flight Center that has been watching the dark terrain of the Moon. They have observed over 260 explosions in the past 7 years.
Marchis said a better organized network of amateur astronomers watching Jupiter is important.
“I think it is important to organize a network of small telescopes that will monitor continuously Jupiter over a long period of time to be capable of estimating the flux of meteors in the outer part of the solar system, helping us to better estimate the age of icy satellite surface of Jupiter but also Saturn,” he said via email. “This is something we could do by combining professional and amateur astronomer efforts.”
Look for future updates as astronomers are trying to organize such a network.
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Thursday at 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern. Watch us live on Google+, ask your questions to the gathered space journalists.
Caught on webcam by amateur astronomer George Hall in Dallas, Texas, the impact on Jupiter that occurred yesterday at 6:35 a.m. CT can be clearly seen in the brief video above as a bright flash along the giant planet’s left side.
According to Hall on his website the video was captured with a 12″ LX200GPS, 3x Televue Barlow, and Point Grey Flea 3 camera using Astro IIDC software.
Great catch, George! Currently this is the only video footage we’ve seen of this particular event. Also, tonight at 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT the SLOOH Space Camera site will broadcast a live viewing of Jupiter to search for any remaining evidence of an impact. Tune in here.
An apparent object impact captured about 6:35 am on Sept. 10, 2012 from Dallas, Texas USA. Credit: George Hall.
UPDATE: Yes, there was an impact! An amateur astronomer in Dallas Texas, George Hall captured the impact flash in his webcam — click here to see his website and image — at about 6:30 am on Sept. 10, 2012.
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From astronomer Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute comes news about a potential new impact on Jupiter. She reports there has been a visual sighting of an apparent fireball on Jupiter earlier today (about 10 hours ago, as of this posting) so the impact site should be visible again over the next few hours. According to amateur astronomers discussing this on G+, the impact area on Jupiter won’t be visible again until about 05:00 UTC, (01:00 EDT). The amateur who observed the flash was Dan Petersen, from Oregon, who made the observation at approximately 11:35 UTC on September 10. Petersen reported it to Richard Schmude of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (ALPO). Hammel says the report sounds realistic, but obviously it needs confirmation if possible: a) by looking for any ‘impact scar’ tonight or over the next few days; b) by searching any webcam video that any observers might have been recording at the time. From the time and position given, the flash was on the North Equatorial Belt at approximately L1=335, L2=219, L3=257. “Let’s hope someone has a record of it!” Hammel says.
If it was the impact was sizable enough, it might have left an impact scar like those seen after the Shoemaker-Levy/9 impacts and this one in 2010:
Color image of impact on Jupiter on June 3, 2010. Credit: Anthony Wesley
This morning (9/10/2012) at 11:35:30 UT, I observed a bright white two second long explosion just inside Jupiter’s eastern limb, located at about Longitude 1 = 335, and Latitude = + 12 degrees north, inside the southern edge of the NEB. This flash appeared to be about 100 miles in diameter. I used my Meade 12″ LX200 GPS telescope and a binoviewer working at 400X for the observation, seeing was very good at the time. I was thinking about imaging Jupiter this morning but decided to observe it instead, had I been imaging I’m sure I would have missed it between adjusting webcam settings and focusing each avi. We’ll have to wait and see if a dark spot develops inside the southern regions of the NEB over the next day or two. Good luck imaging this. My best guess is that it was a small undetected comet that is now history, hopefully it will sign its name on Jupiter’s cloud tops.
If you make any observations or find you have webcam footage that may show such an impact, please send us an email.
Via astronomer Pete Lawrence (@Avertedvision on Twitter) is a simulated view showing where impact may have occurred (X marks the spot).
We’ll provide more updates as they become available.
Caption: July 15 2012 occultation, taken with Canon 550D on Newton 200/1200 mounted on NEQ6Pro. Credit: Andrei Juravle
Astrophotographers in Northern Africa, Europe and the Middle East were treated to a beautiful sight in the early morning hours of July 15, 2012. A lunar occultation of Jupiter took place just before dawn, as the waning crescent Moon slid in front of the planet Jupiter. Venus was hanging around nearby, too. Several astrophotographers were able to capture the event, and some got a bonus look at Jupiter’s Galilean moons, as well! Above is a lovely image by Andrei Juravle.
More below!
Caption: The Moon, Venus and Jupiter. Credit Thierry Legault.
Astrophotographer extraordinaire Thierry Legault took this great shot of Venus, Jupiter and the Moon from Saint-Cloud, France with a Canon 5D mark II and 135mm lens. But look closely: the satellites of Jupiter are visible:
Caption: A closer look reveals Jupiter’s moons! Credit: Thierry Legault.
And as always, you should check out Thierry’s website for more incredible images.
Caption: Jupiter and the Moon hover over Dolmabahce Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. Credit: Rasid Tugral.
Caption: Clouds nearly covered the view in Mombaroccio, Marche, Italy. Credit: Niki Giada.
Caption: A series of images of the Moon’s occultation of Jupiter as seen in Saida, Lebanon. Credit: astroZ1 on Flickr.
Caption: Occultation of Jupiter by the Moon as seen from Smolyan, Bulgaria. Credit: Zlatan Merakov.
More images are still coming in, and you can see more on Universe Today’s Flickr page. Thanks to everyone who submitted their gorgeous images!
A great reason to get up early these days is the pre-dawn show now available from Venus and Jupiter. The two brightest planets in the night sky are paired together in the eastern sky, and Ednilson Oliveira from São Paulo, Brazil got up early this morning, July 6, 2012, to take this gorgeous shot of the planetary duo in the constellation Taurus, hovering over the city.
His specs: Nikon D3100, 18 mm, F/6.3 – Texp = 3 s – ISO 3200.
Beautiful!
For more information about seeing Venus and Jupiter in the early morning skies, watch the video below from Science@NASA:
If you don’t watch the video in its entirety, one thing of note: Venus and the bright star Aldebaran will be right next to each other on the morning of July 9 — which will be a great sight.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
Image caption: Jupiter and Venus in the constellation Taurus in the city of Sao Paulo. Credit: Ednilson Oliveira
