NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December 29, 2000, captured this image of Jupiter, showing its distinctive bands. (NASA/JPL/SSI)
There’s celestial excitement brewing because Jupiter has lost a belt. In addition to the famous red spot, Jupiter has two wide stripes that circle the planet and the Southern belt is gone. Apparently this has happened before, but it doesn’t happen often.
A good piece on npr.org explains that the surface of Jupiter is really a big old cloud and that a number of things could change it. They quote Kelly Beatty, senior contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine who says they have “some confidence” the belt will be back. He also said amateur astronomers were among the first to see the change.
This quote was especially interesting;
“There aren’t enough professionals to keep track of everything going on in the universe all the time,” Beatty says. “So in a sense, they rely on amateur astronomers — who have very good equipment, by the way — to actually keep an eye on things.”
Wow — professionals relying on enthusiastic, well-equipped citizens to help them gather information. Sounds a little like crowdsourcing, user generated content, citizen journalism or whatever ever catchphrase we use to describe using non-professionals in newsgathering. The difference seems to be that astronomers work with it while journalists fear the consequences.
