Wed Jul 20 04:18:11 1994


Report from McDonald Observatory for July 20 UT

We began observing with both a CCD camera on the 0.8m telescope and with ROKCAM on the 2.7m telescope at 23:30 UT (July 19). The L and G impact sites had similar remarkable morphology. A central core was visible surrounded by a semicircular arc to the southwest. These structures were bright in methane bands and dark in the continuum. Both complexes were slightly smaller than the Red Spot.

Sites L through C in longitude were observed with both telescopes.

In addition, we obtained high resolution (R=60,000) spectroscopy with the 2.7m telescope 2dcoude spectrometer of impact sites L and D/G. These sites showed considerably less methane absorption in the cores of strong methane lines in the 890 and 727 nm bands. This result was confirmed in low resolution spectroscopy from the 2.1m telescope.

The MLRS (laser ranging) telescope also obtained a total of 2 hours of video imaging of Jupiter with precise time stamping.

Images in GIF format are available on WWW at
http://www.as.utexas.edu/comet/comet.html
and are available for anonymous ftp on verdi.as.utexas.edu in the pub/comet directory.

The McDonald Comet Impact Science Team



Last Modification: 94/07/21 19:35 MET
Curator: C. Kronberg (smil@agleia.de)