After breaking the news of Anthony Wesley’s discovery of an impact scar on Jupiter on Monday morning (while I was waiting to board a plane to Melbourne), Friday night was my first opportunity to capture an image of the now famous “Wesley Impact Scar”, or “Bird Strike” (Anthony’s forum name is “bird”).

Jupiter, GRS and Wesley Impact Scar (right on the limb, top right)

The image above shows the GRS just past the Central Meridian (CM), and the Impact Scar is just coming into view, on the top right of the image.

I’d been in Melbourne all week and was very frustrated to have not been able to capture an image of it until now. On Friday night, 24th July, the impact scar was transitting while Jupiter was almost right overhead, but unfortunately the seeing conditions were only average, and deteriorated even further as the Bird Strike came more into view.

Please continue reading to see another image from the session.

The image below was taken about 40 minutes after the image above, and by this time the seeing was starting to deteriorate and progressively got worse as the night wore on.

It shows the GRS, the Wesley Impact Scar (top right), and Io has just popped out from behind Jupiter (in the green and blue channels only – in the red channel it was still behind Jupiter, hence the aqua colour).

Jupiter, GRS and Wesley Impact Scar (with Io popping out from behind)

I continued imaging for another 90 minutes or so as the impact scar crossed the CM, but none of the data was usable due to the seeing conditions.

The images were taken with my 12″ Newt and DMK21AU04, at 30fps for 40 seconds in each channel. Only 300 frames from each channel were used in the processing.

Hopefully I’ll get another opportunity in the next few days to capture more images of the bird strike – maybe in better seeing next time.

Thanks for looking.

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posted in Astrophotography | 2 Comments