Jupiter Dinged Again

Impact Point

June 2010 Around 11pm

Nothing overly exciting going on at the moment, unless you live on Jupiter, which has just had another impact event. The fireball appeared in the giant planet's atmosphere June 3 at 20h30m GMT.

Jupiter has been the target of several huge impacts within the last two decades. In July 1994, 21 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit the planet, any of which would have wiped us out. More recently, a 600 metre wide asteroid struck Jupiter on July 18th last year. This makes two impacts in a year twice in a year, which is actually quite alarming. Now a 600 metre meteorite is no where big as the 10kilomtre job that wiped out the 70% of everything including the dinosaurs 65,000,000 years. But if one landed in the North Atlantic at a 120,000 miles per hour plus there wouldn’t be much left of Europe or the Eastern Sea board of America. But not to worry Bruce Willis would sort it out in that rather fetching vest of his. But just to reassure you it all happens on Jupiter because the planet is so big it attracts these rogue celestial mountains and throws them out of a stable orbit, it’s like the solar system’s Hoover. Video below

Now more mundanely Mercury is back in the morning sky but to dim and too close to the sun to bother with.

Venus is still very much with us in the north western sky during and well after Sunset. Venus, Pollux, and Castor line up straight as twilight fades on Friday. You just can’t miss Venus its fantastically bright at moment. It’s on the other side of the Sun at the moment and in a telescope it shows as an almost complete but tiny disc. It’s getting nearer all the time and as it comes around the sun toward us, it will gradually change to a much larger crescent, by late summer. Venus is as high in twilight as it will appear this year; soon it begins its slow summer sink.

Mars glows in the west, forming a striking pair with bluer Regulus (magnitude +1.4). Mars has been closing in on Regulus for weeks. They passed each other on June 6th, 0.8° apart — a pencil-width at arm's length. In a telescope Mars is just a very tiny blob, 5.8 arcseconds in diameter.

Jupiter rises around 2 a.m. and shines in the southeast at dawn. Nothing else there is nearly so bright.

Saturn (magnitude +1.0, in the head of Virgo) glows in the southwest during evening. Take a look at the star map for Scilly on the blog if you want to find it.

And that was your night sky for the week ending on the 133rd anniversary of Henry Ossian Flipper becoming the first African American cadet to graduate from West Point.