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- A trail of impact sites
-
- An image of Jupiter taken from the Calar Alto 3.5 meter telescope on at 22:45
- GMT on July 18 1994, a few hours after the impact of Fragment H from
- Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. The image was taken in the infrared at a
- wavelength of 1.7 microns in order to enhance the contrast between Jupiter
- and the impact sites. The bright object just off Jupiter's disk to the upper right
- is the satellite Ganymede, the large oval near the center is the Great Red
- Spot, and each of the six fainter blobs near the bottom of the image are
- impact sites. From right to left, the spots are: G2, D4, H1, F3, E4, A6 where
- the letter refers to the impacting fragment and the number refers to the
- number of times the impact site has rotated into view (i.e. F3 has appeared
- on the Earth-facing side of Jupiter for the third time). Two pairs of spots (G2,
- D4 and F3, E4) lie close together. Jupiter rotates once in approximately 10
- hours. By the end of this week (22 July), there should be fifteen to twenty
- such spots encircling Jupiter's southern hemisphere like a string of pearls.
-
- Observers at Calar Alto:
-
- Tom Herbst, Kurt Birkle, Ulrich Thiele
- (Max-Plack-Institut fuer Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany)
-
- Doug Hamilton
- (Max-Plack-Institut fuer Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany)
-
- Hermann Boenhardt, Alex Fiedler, Karl-Heinz Mantel
- (Universitaets Sternwarte Muenchen, Germany)
-
- Jose Luis Ortiz
- (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Granada, Spain)
-
- Giovanni Calamai, Andrea Richichi
- (Osservatorio di Arcetri, Firenze, Italy)
-
-
- Contact: Mark McCaughrean, Max-Planck-Institut fuer Astronomie
- Koenigstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
- Phone: (49) 6221 528 303
- FAX: (49) 6221 528 246
- e-mail mjm@mpia-hd.mpg.de (Internet)
-
-