An amateur astronomer from Australia took a break from watching sports to discover a blot in Jupiter’s atmosphere that is the size of our own home planet.

Anthony Wesley, a computer programmer who spends up to 20 hours per week watching and photographing Jupiter through his own backyard telescope, first tipped off NASA on Monday. The space agency used its own telescope, based in Hawaii, to confirm the Earth-sized hole and to snap these pictures, which were released late Monday, along with this explanation:

Following up on a tip by an amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley of Australia, that a new dark “scar” had suddenly  appeared on Jupiter, this morning between 3 and 9 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. and noon EDT) scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, gathered evidence indicating an impact. New infrared images show the likely impact point was near the south polar region, with a visibly dark “scar” and bright upwelling particles in the upper atmosphere detected in near-infrared wavelengths.

Incredibly, the sighting comes nearly 15 years to the day after the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter, which at the time was the first observable comet-planet collision.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 8:57 am and is filed under Notes from Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.