What Is This Mysterious Object?

[honestrosewater]

The color is off, but is that Jupiter being hit by that Shoemaker-Levy comet?

 

[BobG]

Venus in the foreground, the Sun in the background.

 

[LENIN]

Maybe one of the outerer planets I'd Neptun or Urenus (deffinately not Seturn and probebly not Jupiter). But never the less the colors are unusual.

 

[Townsend]

Is that that tenth planet? Couldn't be...do we have pictures of it even?

 

[zanazzi78]

Can`t be Venus it doesn`t have any moons,

I don`t think that it`s the transit of Venus either since the Sun doesn`t have swirling cloud at it`s poles

By the Cloud structure i`d say it`s Jupiter and the Moon (as a guess) Io

 

[BobG]

Who says the picture has to be recording visible light? Images of the Sun

 

[zanazzi78]

Who says the picture has to be recording visible light? Images of the Sun

Nobody, but the quality of the image suggests that it`s recent, the transit of venus that occurred on the 8 june 2004, Venus passed across the Southern hemisphere of the sun, and the object casting the shadow just doesn`t fit the path of venus even if the image is inverted.

With the high level of contract you would expect to see sun spots and other recognisable solar features. The colour is probably due to a Neodymium contrast enhancing filter. So I stand by my answer of the Image is of Jupiter.

 

[brewnog]

HRW has got this (it's a comet impact on Jupiter), but Bob gets half a point for realising that it wasn't visible light. The photo was taken in the UV range.

 

[honestrosewater]

HRW has got this (it's a comet impact on Jupiter), but Bob gets half a point for realising that it wasn't visible light. The photo was taken in the UV range.

I still don't have a clue, so I reckon it's Bob's turn.

Was it Shoemaker-Levy 9? The pattern looked the same to me. I must know! Eh. :shy: Woot! It was: http://www.solarviews.com/cap/sl9/hst22juv.htm
I am the master.

 

[brewnog]

It was indeed Shoemaker-Levy 9, taken by Hubble's wide field camera.

 

[zanazzi78]

Doh! I`m soo Stoopid!

 

[BobG]

This should be easy. But, what's under the floor?

 

[loseyourname]

The rest of the payload mate?

 

[BobG]

Close enough. Actually it's on the launch pad on top of a Titan rocket. It's a DMSP satellite (a low orbiting weather satellite). The flat panels on the side are the solar array panels folded around the satellite. The red circles are covers on the transmitting antennas on the bottom of the satellite.

I used to control those back in the eighties and early nineties. Kind of a fun job. Being low orbiters, a tracking station couldn't see the satellite for very long. Whenever anything went wrong it was like the two-minute drills in the NFL, since it would be over an hour before you could talk to the satellite again.