A new animation ...

On March 12th, Mike Salway of Australia made this 90-minute movie using a 10-inch telescope and a CCD video camera:

Photo in the News: Jupiter Spawns a New Red Spot

March 7, 2006—Look out, Great Red Spot. A brash young contender may be aiming for your title of Solar System's Most Powerful Storm.

NASA announced Friday that a new red spot has been born on Jupiter, as seen in a February 27 photograph (at top) by an amateur astronomer.

The new, formerly white spot—actually a storm named Oval BA—has been swirling since at least 2000 but acquired the familiar blushing tint of its centuries-old cousin only a few weeks ago. Nicknamed "Red, Jr.," Oval BA formed as three tempests gradually combined into a single superstorm, as seen in the bottom set of images.

So why are the storms red? No one really knows, but some scientists suggest that these miles-high vortices suck up material from lower altitudes. Once exposed to the sun's rays, the theory goes, the material reddens.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...07_jupiter.html

There are several great images here: http://jupiter.cstoneind.com/

Quote from Spaceweather.com:

MEANWHILE ON JUPITER things are getting weird. Two anti-cyclones are bumping
into Jupiter's new red spot, "Red Jr." Together, the trio strangely resemble
Mickey Mouse.

Visit http://spaceweather.com for more information and pictures of Jupiter and
the Zodiacal Lights.

Sunburn?

Can we tell if the spots contain iron oxides or thiocynates - typical red stuff?

One red coloring agent proposed years ago.... dunno the current status of the hypothesis.... was red phosphorous... made from the observed trace gas phosphine, PH3.

Werid I can't find the article?

Go to the main Spaceweather page and look for the View Archives
section in the upper right side. Enter March 23, 2006 as the date,
then scroll down that page past the article on Zodiacal Light.

According to RED SPOT JR. site, "On mid-April 2006, a group of professional astronomers lead by Dr Imke de Pater and Dr Phil Marcus (UC Berkeley) will use the Hubble Space Telescope to image both the GRS and Red Spot Jr".
Do someone knows if/when images will be published?

If you scroll down on their page to the April 12 and March 18 images of
Jupiter, you will see accompanying images of some of the Galilean moons.
They are good enough that some details can be seen on them. And Io
looks very orange red.

And go to his linked titled "My Best Images of Jupiter" and scroll to the
end of that page. He has an amazing animation of Io and Europa transitting
Jupiter on March 26.

http://jupiter.cstoneind.com/

Yes, I already saw images/animations and they are beautiful.
Is incredible to see which results can be obtained by skilled people using a less-than-30cm telescope!
However, I was looking for HST (or at least some ground AO image) in order to finally see the new red spot details...

Here you go...

FOR RELEASE: 1:00 pm (EDT) May 4, 2006

PHOTO NO.: STScI-PRC06-19

HUBBLE SNAPS BABY PICTURES OF JUPITER'S "RED SPOT JR."

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers their most detailed
view yet of a second red spot emerging on Jupiter. For the first time in
history, astronomers have witnessed the birth of a new red spot on the
giant planet, which is located half a billion miles away. The storm is
roughly one-half the diameter of its bigger and legendary cousin, the
Great Red Spot. Researchers suggest that the new spot may be related to
a possible major climate change in Jupiter's atmosphere. These images
were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys on April 8 and 16,
2006.

To see and read more about the research on the Web, visit:

http://hubblesite.org/news/2006/19

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/


Right now, Jupiter is having a close encounter with Earth. The giant planet is very bright in the night sky and looks terrific through backyard telescopes.

FULL STORY at

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/04....htm?list161084

Finally!
Is beautifull!!
Also in APOD page now....

This is a enhanced version of the Hubble picture

New great images from Hubble and from Earth:
http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1724_1.asp
"Measurements by Simon-Miller of her team's HST image give a long-axis dimension of 13,480 km for Oval BA and 20,740 km for the Great Red Spot". Guys, this baby is approximately Earth-sized!
http://www.redspotjr.com/
I have impression that distance between GRS and JRS is slightly tightened in the last month...

less than 2 months to collision???

It amazes me how much amateur observations have increased in clarity.

I can't even imagine what the next 10 years brings!

While it is simply amazing that amateur astronomers nowadays produce better images than professional observatories did a couple of decades ago, I don't believe this trend will continue much longer by improving cameras and increasing telescope apertures. Even now, image quality is most strongly affected by atmospheric seeing and without adaptive optics, you can't squeeze out a much larger resolution, no matter how good equipment you have.
On the other hand, it'll be interesting to follow advances in adaptive optics over the years and how affordable they'll become to amateur guys. Check out Emily's blog on Uranus' equinox, there's a neat Keck montage showing just how AO improved in only 4 years. The next big quantum leap in amateur observing will surely come when (if?) AO becomes affordable. It's still best suited for infrared observations, though.

Maybe this is one way how the Great Red Spot has remained active and huge
for centuries, by absorbing smaller storms?

I can, or at least try to do : next steps will include the diffusion of Orthogonal Transfer CCD (like the ones developed for PanStarrs project) which will reduce atmospheric blur through rapid pixels shift. And, on a longer period, perhaps the diffusion of simple, economic AO systems for evolved amateurs...

ugordan Thanks for posting that.

The two spots are even closer now, look to Christopher Go site. He say:

NASA Science News for June 5, 2006

The two biggest storms in the solar system are about to go bump in the night, in plain view of backyard telescopes.

FULL STORY at

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/05....htm?list161084

closer and closer:
Click to view attachment
all images were taken from Christopher Go site.

Note also images reported in the other site dedicated to red spot, is incredible to see surface features on some galileian satellites from amateurs!

I hope that WFPC2 on Hubble is still working fine, unlike ACS and that they are planing to use it to observe this close encounter event...

is it just me or is the spot turning the white band orange?
edit- or at least-why is the one side white and the other orange?

The band the LRS is travelling in seems to be entirely south of the GRS; I don't see why they shouldn't just pass by without much, if any, interaction.

The expectation is that they'll just breeze past. There was an exhibition meeting of the BAA in Cambridge last weekend, and the director of the Jupiter Section showed images that demonstrate that new spot is getting darker and darker red over time, coinciding with it speeding up - and also, the GRS is getting smaller and lighter ( over the past century or so ) suggesting an opposite trend.

Doug

Doug, are you talking about a possible passdown between the two spots? Would be great to see this, even if time scale of the two events (GRS fading and RSJr reddening) seems completely different...

Now almost touching!
Click to view attachment
Christopher Go comments is:"The GRS and Oval BA are very close now. From the looks of it both storms will just pass by! There is enough clearance between the two storms"

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0607/21jupiter/

definately not colliding. beautiful gemini image

From the latest issue of the journal Earth, Planets and Space:

Oscillating motion of the Jovian Great Red Spot and Numerical Experiments with IG equation
Tadashi Asada and Isao Miyazaki
Earth Planets Space 58, 905-910 (2006)
Abstract

New images from Keck:

http://www.keckobservatory.org/article.php?id=88

New article:

- Jupiter's Little Red Spot growing stronger (Spaceflight Now)

Red Jr's winds now raging up to approximately 400 miles per hour (wind speed of Great Red Spot).

Why Red Jr's intensity is growing stronger? Change in size or ...

<< According to the team, the increased intensity of the Little Red Spot probably explains why it changed color. >>

So why are the storms red?
Scientists are still puzzled… sulfur, germanium oxide and various carbon compounds have been proposed as an explanation but the coloring agents still remain an enigma…

I'm curious: is the progenitor to Red Jr. the big, while oval that Cassini saw in 2000?

It certainly looks conspicuous. The funky composite is a MT3/MT2/UV1 as RGB. The oval appears bright in MT3 and very dark in UV so it turns out orange in the composite.

I've been trying to track down the origin of that storm too. Jupiter is hard because no cloud features stay put -- stuff at different latitudes shifts with respect to each other with timescales measured in days, and stuff at different longitudes but the same latitude shifts on slightly longer timescales.

According to some image captions on Photojournal the three white ovals first formed in the 1930s.

Here's the Voyager 1 view, from July 1979. You can see three large white ovals of roughly equal size in the band just south of the Great Red Spot. One is just below the spot, the other two are some distance away.

Here's an early Hubble view from May 1991, with just one of the spots showing up. And here's a very low resolution set from Hubble in July 1994, where you can barely make out the positions of the white spots. They're much closer together than they were in 1979.

Here's a Hubble view from February 1995. Three white ovals are now immediately adjacent. The caption says that the outer two white spots are ones that formed in the 1930s. What's the center one then? This caption also refers to another view from seven months earlier -- I haven't tracked that one down yet. There's a second image on the Hubble site, but there's no caption information saying when it was taken.

Galileo was in position to witness their merger in February 1998 but was of course only able to return tight views. Here are two Galileo views from February 1997 and September 1998. It says that two of the storms were called BC and DE after they formed. What was the third one called? What's the significance of these names? There's a whole bunch more of the February 1997 views here, here, here, here, and here...and 13 more...as well as a blinky movie.

Here's the Cassini view, from October 2000. You see just the one oval, roughly 150 degrees of longitude away from the Great Red Spot. So, yes, ugordan, that's the progenitor to Little Red.

--Emily