It’s been cool, cloudy, rainy here. And thunderstorms at night! So no Perseid viewing for us. I was going to go up to ZigZag on Mt. Hood with friends on Friday night, sleep out under the stars, see the Perseids after the moonset. But it was rainy and thundery, and I’m glad we all stayed home.
NASA and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore released this new Hubble Space Telescope view of Jupiter on August 8, 2019. The telescope acquired the image on June 27. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? It’s reminiscent of some spacecraft images. Space fans waiting for the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope – which will be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope – will have to wait until 2021, but, in the meantime, Hubble’s still got it!
The image reveals Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which appeared to be disintegrating earlier this year, or at least changing, and which appears on the small side in this image, but still fairly robust. The Great Red Spot is a vast storm, which has been seen raging on Jupiter for hundreds of years. There’s a good article about it published today in The Atlantic, which you can find here: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Behaving Strangely .
A storm of geomagnetic proportions is set to hit planet Earth over the weekend, creating a scenario where we might be able to see the northern lights in Milwaukee over Labor Day weekend.
Scientists at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks say that if the weather behaves, "auroral activity" is expected to be noticeably high. If you don't know what "auroral activity" means, that's okay.
